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"THE NEXT WAR" 




"A BIT OF A BRUTE" 

The use of bayonet practice was moral; by it a blazing, vicious 
hatred was worked up in the common soldier. 



"THE NEXT WAR" 

AN APPEAL TO COMMON SENSE 



BY 
WILL IRWIN 

AUTHOR OF "MEN, WOMEN AND WAR," 
"A REPORTER IN ARMAGEDDON," ETC. 




NEW YORK 

E. P. DUTTON fcr COMPANY 

681 FIFTH AVENUE 



Copyright, 1921, 
BY E. P. DUTTON & COMPANY 



All Rights Reserved 



M -6 192' 



Printed In the United States of America 

g)C!.A617218 



CONTENTS 

CHAPTER PAGK 

I. War and Prophecy i 

II. The Breeding of Calamity 5 

III. Second Ypres 23 

IV. The New Warfare 35 

V. Tactics of the Next War 44 

VI. War and the Race 67 

VII. The Cost in Money 79 

VIII. Economics and the Next War 103 

IX. "The Tonic of Nations" 112 

X. The Discipline of Peace 119 

XI. "Defensive Preparation" 128 

XII. The Dramatic Moment 137 

XIII. Proposed Ways to Peace 142 

XIV. The Tempter 158 



ILLUSTRATIONS 

"A Bit of a Brute" Frontispiece 

FACING 
PAGE 

Obsolete Armament 16 

Artillery Fire in 1815 40 

Artillery Fire in 1915 40 

The Increasing Size of Bombs 42 

A Land Dreadnought 56 

Proposed Aircraft Carrier 58 

A Half Ton Shell 95 

Campus of the University of Michigan no 



"THE NEXT WAR" 



THE NEXT WAR 

CHAPTER I 

WAR AND PROPHECY 

Mankind, it has been said, lives by happy com- 
binations of words, thinks by phrases. With phrases, 
no less than with engines of destruction, the world 
fought the Great War of 19 14-18 — "The War for 
Democracy" on the Allied side, "The Place in the 
Sun" and "Spreading our Kultur" on the German. 
Volumes of political essays and bales of editorials 
have less influence among the American people at 
present than that popular expression, "A hundred 
per cent American." 

In the two years since the Armistice, a new phrase 
has entered the discussion of military affairs not only 
in America but in all the European countries — 
"the next war." It appears many times daily in 
the reactionary press of Berlin, Vienna, Budapest, 
Paris. It sprinkles the reports in the staff colleges 
of the Continent, of England, of the United States. 
It has furnished already the theme for books in all 
European languages. "The First World War," the 



2 THE NEXT WAR 

title of a book lately published by Colonel Reping- 
ton, is only a variant on this phrase. 

Prophecy concerning the trend of political affairs 
is not only perilous but well-nigh impossible. In all 
the prophecy of the late war, who foretold the future 
course of Russia? There were whisperings, in- 
deed in the Allied countries, there were loud fore- 
casts in Germany, that Russia might withdraw from 
the Entente; but who prophesied the curious circum- 
stances of her withdrawal and the still more curious 
results to which it led? Ten European statesmen 
believed that Holland, Switzerland or even Spain 
might enter the great war to one who counted on 
the United States. And who, before 19 17, prophe- 
sied in what manner we would be the deciding factor 
or even hinted at our curious influence on the peace? 
Who looked forward and foresaw the American flag 
flying over the mighty fortress of Ehrenbreitstein 
at Coblenz? 

Such affairs as these belong to the political side 
of war, partake of its uncertainty. It would be 
foolish, therefore, for even the wisest and best-in- 
formed statesman, and still less for a journalist, to 
prophesy what nations or combinations of nations 
might oppose forces in that "next war." The com- 
plexity of the question, involving as it does eco- 
nomics, internal politics, religion, sudden outbreaks 
of mob-mind, shifts of population, the rise of lead- 
ers as yet unknown, renders forecast impossible. 
Beside such a game, chess is as simple as jackstraws. 



WAR AND PROPHECY 3 

But forecasting the methods, strategies and effects 
of future wars is more like a purely mathematical 
problem, and infinitely easier. Such forecasts have 
been made in the past; and the best-informed and 
more intelligent of them have been vindicated by the 
course of events. Before the Russo-Japanese war, 
military critics who combined sound information 
with sound imagination said that in the next war 
between thoroughly prepared armies, the frontal 
lines would become deadlocked in trenches, and that 
battle could then be won only by a sudden and well- 
conceived surprise on the flank. That is exactly 
the history of the Russo-Japanese war; Nogi's great 
flanking movement won the battle of Mukden after 
the main forces had undergone some weeks of stale- 
mate in the front trenches. Had the Russians pos- 
sessed a single scout aeroplane, Nogi's success would 
have been impossible. The aeroplane appeared a 
few years later, proved itself not a toy but a prac- 
tical machine. Then the military critics, of the class 
before mentioned made a new forecast. A war 
between densely-populated and thoroughly armed 
peoples such as those of Europe, they said, might be 
decided by an overwhelming initial thrust. Failing 
that, it must settle down to a long deadlock in 
trenches, a war" of attrition with unprecedented 
losses, to be decided only when one side or the other 
crumpled up through exhaustion of economic re- 
sources and of morale. That view was expressed 
for the United States in Frederick Palmer's novel, 



4 THE NEXT WAR 

"The Last Shot." And these forecasts of the mili- 
tary critics might stand now as histories of the great 
war. 

So it is possible to speak with some authority con- 
cerning the character of that "next war," especially 
since so many able Europeans have already recorded 
and analyzed the experiences and lessons of "the first 
world war." Though we cannot do more than guess 
at the participants, we can foresee the methods of 
that struggle and its direct and indirect results on 
the lives and property, the souls and bodies, of the 
nations who find themselves involved. 

It is difficult, however, rightly to see the future 
without at least a glance at the past. It is doubly 
difficult in this discussion, because during the war of 
1914-18 certain forces hitherto smouldering burst 
into blaze. Not only did the character of warfare 
change, but its whole relation to peoples and to 
human life. From now on, we must consider war in 
an entirely new light. An understanding of the dif- 
ference between old wars and "the next war" is 
essential to an understanding of the present struggle 
between militarism and reasonable pacifism, between 
the aristocratic ideal of society and the democratic, 
between those who believe in that next war and those 
who are groping toward a state of society which will 
abolish war. 



CHAPTER II 

THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 

Man alone, among the higher animals, seems 
characteristically to fight his own kind to the death. 
Doubtless before there was law or morals the primi- 
tive savage often got the woman, the ox or the stone 
knife which he wanted simply by killing the pos- 
sessor. With the organization of society, groups 
and tribes began to do the same thing collectively 
as a means of acquiring live-stock, wives, slaves or 
territory; and we had war. In primitive society, if 
we may judge from our study of existing savages, 
wars were often comparatively bloodless affairs, set- 
tled by a contest between two champions or by a 
few wounds. Whole groups and tribes may have 
lived on the pacifist theory, as do today certain 
African nations which will not keep cattle because 
cattle bring on raids and peace is with them pref- 
erable to property. 

When the curtain lifts on recorded history, tribes 
were collecting into nations, and kingship was firmly 
fixed in human affairs. By now, war also was a 
permanent human institution; every throne was 
propped up by an army. The relation of warfare to 

5 



6 THE NEXT WAR 

this early progress has been traced by H. G. Wells 
in his "Outline of History." A people settled down, 
developed agriculture, town life, a literature, the 
mechanical arts, the beginnings of scientific knowl- 
edge; accumulated wealth and desirable luxuries. In 
this process, they became to the barbarian point of 
view "effeminate," and easy prey for conquest. 

Warfare, then and for centuries afterwards, was 
mostly a matter of individual fighting. That side 
was the victor which had the greater average of men 
strong and skilled with the sword or lance, accurate 
with the bow. The settled peoples, busy with the 
arts of peace, had not the time for that life-long, in- 
tensive, athletic training which made good warriors. 
The barbarians, therefore, beat them in battle, took 
their wealth, settled down among them, learned their 
arts. They in turn became weakened for warfare, 
and another wave of barbarians repeated the pro- 
cess. Though there were exceptions, such as the 
long hold of the civilized Roman Empire, this was 
the general rhythm of ancient wars; even of me- 
diaeval wars. 

Viewed in this light, we have reason for arguing 
that warfare was a positive if costly benefit. The 
world in general was without means of communi- 
cation; the written word which carried knowledge 
was unavailable to whole peoples, to all but a few 
even among the most favored peoples. Travel be- 
yond one's national boundaries was almost unknown; 



THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 7 

the barbarians had an invariable custom of killing 
strangers. Possibly by no other means than war- 
fare could the rudiments of civilization have reached 
the outer fringe. When the wild Persians over- 
whelmed them, the peoples of the Mesopotamian 
Basin had a written language, an understanding of 
primitive mechanics, a system of star-measurement. 
Left alone, they might have gone on to advanced 
mechanics such as the steam engine, to the truth 
about sidereal space and the world in space. The 
Persians blew out all that bright promise; yet before 
they themselves were conquered, they had acquired 
what their captives had learned. So it went, the 
world over, except in those three or four rather 
abnormal centuries during which Rome held sway 
over the world; and not even Rome was wholly an 
exception. She conquered Greece; but intellectually 
she became so absorbed by the Hellenic people that 
every Roman gentleman must speak perfect Greek 
or he was no gentleman. The Goths came into 
Southern Europe unlettered barbarians; in a few 
centuries, they had in Ravenna the most advanced 
civilization of their time; and they learned it all 
from the conquered. The Northmen got their let- 
ters, their mathematics, their mechanics from subject 
peoples. The German Junkers professed that they 
waged the late war to spread their culture by con- 
quering; the ancient peoples spread their culture 
by being conquered. He would be indeed a preju- 



8 THE NEXT WAR 

diced pacifist who ignored this aspect of old war, or 
denied the possibility that in such times war was 
beneficial. 

In those days of primitive nations warfare had 
no rules, or very few, of mercy or decency. The 
conquering king and his men, undeterred by scruples, 
did as they pleased with the conquered. If it 
served their whim or purpose, they slaughtered a 
surrendered army, even the women and children, of 
a whole surrendered tribe. The kingly inscriptions 
of Egypt and Assyria boast of such deeds as glories 
of the crown. When the tribe was spared, it was often 
merely that it might work to pay the victor tribute, 
or to furnish him with slaves. If there were pro- 
testing voices they have left no record. But as 
early as the great days of Greece, we find a little 
faint criticism both of war itself and its methods. 
The thing, certain men thought, was an evil, a 
calamity. It could not be stopped, probably; but 
it was an evil nevertheless. There did arise, how- 
ever, a dim code — rudimentary morals of war. It 
was no longer quite ethical to kill women and chil- 
dren, to slaughter your prisoners. It was often 
done; but it required explanation and apology. 
When, some half-century before Christ, Julius 
Csesar put to death the Usepetes and Tenectri, he 
was denounced in the Roman senate, and Cato even 
proposed that he be turned over to the Germans. 

Christianity, when it came at last powerfully into 
human affairs, carried forward this moral move- 



THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY g 

ment. A divine institution applied by imperfect 
men, it did not strike at the roots of war; nor in- 
deed did it seem clearly to recognize them. It es- 
tablished, however, the principle that an unjust war 
was wicked; and it did strive to ameliorate the un- 
necessary horrors and to fix the tradition of chival- 
rous warfare. The Truce of God, by which it be- 
came wicked to fight on certain days of the week, 
was an attempt in this direction. 

The movement collapsed in the great religious or 
half-religious wars of the sixteenth century, and 
for a reason quite logical and understandable. Both 
sides were fighting heresy, a sin and crime — they 
thought — which did not merely injure men in this 
life as do most ordinary crimes, but which con- 
demned their souls to an eternity of misery. No 
punishment was too severe for heresy. Hence such 
massacres as those of the Thirty Years' War in 
Germany, and the sack of Antwerp in the Low Coun- 
tries. 

When mankind came out of this madness, the drift 
toward chivalrous warfare was resumed. The code, 
by the twentieth century, had become definite; it 
was a chapter in every general military text book, a 
course in the education of every professional sol- 
dier; finally it was sanctioned almost as international 
law by the Hague Peace Conference. In principle, 
war must rest as easily as possible on non-combat- 
ants such as women and children; nor might even 
an armed enemy be killed unnecessarily. In detail, 



io THE NEXT WAR 

it was agreed that a city might not be besieged until 
the non-combatants had been given time to get away 
from the ensuing bombardment and starvation, that 
the victors holding occupied territory must be re- 
sponsible for the lives of the inhabitants, that prison- 
ers of wars must not only be spared but adequately 
fed and housed, that surgeons, nurses and stretcher- 
bearers must have every reasonable opportunity to 
rescue and succor the wounded; finally that certain 
"barbarous" methods of killing, such as explosive 
bullets and poison gases, might not be used. And 
the military clan of all nations generally accepted 
this code as the law and the gospel; they had been 
bred in the idea of chivalry, and had developed a 
beautiful and strict conception of professional ethics 
which implied truth and honor toward their own, 
and a sense of mercy toward their enemies. With 
such an attitude toward war, the nations entered the 
unprecedented struggle of 1914-18. 

In the meantime, another current had been run- 
ning among the European peoples; it rs necessary to 
understand that in order to understand the present 
situation. In the period since the religious wars, in 
general during a long period before that, warfare 
had settled into the hands of professional armies, 
officered by the aristocracy, recruited in general from 
the dregs of the population, padded with mercenary 
soldiers of fortune. These forces were compara- 
tively small, even in time of war. 

In 1704, Marlborough won the battle of Blen- 



THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 11 

heim and imposed his will on the Continent of 
Europe with 50,000 mixed British, Dutch and Aus- 
trian troops. France was considered, in this period, 
the great military power of the world. Just before 
the Revolution of 1789 her armies had a theoretical 
war strength of 210,000, or about one in 100 of 
the population. Nor was the economic burden of 
warfare very heavy. The weapons were compara- 
tively few and primitive — flint lock muskets for the 
infantry, sabres and lances for the cavalry, plain 
smooth-bore cannon for the artiller*y. Speaking 
generally, ammunition consisted of four standard 
commodities — black powder, round lead bullets, 
flints, and solid cannon balls. The factories which 
supplied enough of this ammunition for the limited 
armies of the day represented only a very small part 
of the nation's productive forces. And, except in 
regions swept by the armies, the industries of the 
nations went on in war much as in peace. Even an 
unsuccessful war laid on the people only a compara- 
tively light burden of taxation. The losses in men 
were not so great but that the general increase in 
races almost instantly filled the gap. At Blenheim, 
before mentioned, Marlborough lost less than five 
thousand men both killed and wounded, the defeated 
French and their Bavarian allies only eleven 
thousand. 

Then came the French Revolution. The new, 
fanatical French Republic, opposed by an alliance 
of all the kings of Europe, its frontier invaded, its 



12 THE NEXT WAR 

nobility joined with the enemy, faced the alternative 
of a struggle with every resource it had or ex- 
tinction and the gallows. The principle of conscrip- 
tion was decreed for the first time by a great na- 
tion. Every man capable of bearing arms must serve 
or hold himself ready to serve. And national in- 
dustries also were mobilized, even if crudely. 
Theoretically, at least, all the iron-workers of France 
went to work on guns, cannon, pikes and ammuni- 
tion. In the very streets of Paris stood the forges, 
hammering out bayonets. 

There followed the twenty years of the Na- 
poleonic wars, wherein conscription was applied in 
fact if not always in name. From that time, through 
fifty years of comparative peace, the thing grew as 
a principle of statecraft. It did not become set- 
tled and universal, however, until after the Franco- 
Prussian War of 1870. Prussia, ambitious leader of 
the German states, herself led by men with ruthless 
genius, had applied the principle of conscription, had 
planned and studied the possibilities of modern war- 
fare as they had never been studied before. The 
German army was ready "to the last buckle" when 
it burst on France, swept up the brave but ill-organ- 
ized army of MacMahon, took Metz and Paris, and 
in six months brought about a peace which tore from 
France two provinces, nearly her whole supply of 
iron ore, a discriminating tariff agreement, and the 
unprecedented indemnity of a billion dollars. Ger- 
many had shown the way to the militarists. 



THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 13 

Now we must go back again and trace for a 
moment a third current, running into that cesspool 
which overflowed in 19 14. 

The era of kingship, as a focus for human loyalty, 
had passed into the era of Powers. And these 
Powers grew as predatory as the Roman Empire, 
though less frankly and obviously so. The age of 
machinery, of intensive manufacture, had arrived. 
Europe produced only a part of the raw materials 
which she needed for her furnaces, her forges or 
her looms. That country would prosper best, it 
was felt, which held the tightest grip on the sources 
of raw material. Every European nation was turn- 
ing out more manufactured goods than it could use 
at home; all needed foreign trade; and "trade fol- 
lows the flag." Finally, as national wealth was 
multiplied through the fruitful processes of ma- 
chinery, Europe began to pile up surplus capital. 
Investment in new, undeveloped lands was much 
more profitable to capital than domestic investment 
under tight conditions. 

Out beyond the fringes of European civiliza- 
tion lay barbaric and semi-civilized peoples owning 
raw materials, ready to buy European manufactured 
goods, promising still other benefits to the nation 
which could possess them either as conquerors or 
"protectors." It was easy for a European states- 
man, who wanted a fruitful barbarian country, to 
find the pretext. A native king, we will say, was en- 
couraged to get hopelessly into debt with a Euro- 



H THE NEXT WAR 

pean government or banking firm. An "incident" 
occurred. There were Europeans who made a trade 
of bringing on such incidents. National honor was 
offended; also, there was the debt. The army of 
the European power involved — sometimes blood- 
lessly, sometimes after a brief campaign — assumed 
the responsibilities of the native king. The debt 
was paid in time; but the European control re- 
mained. I describe here, and only as an example, 
one method among many. 

When any given power so extended its "influence," 
it tried to make that influence exclusive. It must 
have all the raw materials and all the markets 
which it cared to take. It must have all the rights 
to invest capital. When the European nation, for 
fear of its rivals, could not take over any unde- 
veloped nation outright, it tried to bring it at least 
within its "sphere of influence" — a kind of half- 
control leading in time to full conquest. The critics 
of this system call it "financial imperialism." For 
European diplomacy, backed by enormous armies, 
by great national banking houses, by munitions mani 
ufacturers, had become almost frankly commercial. 

Diplomacy kept the long peace which this policy 
always endangered by a system borrowed from the 
eighteenth century and much improved in the nine- 
teenth. "The Balance of Power" it used to be 
called; now it was termed "the Concert of the 
Powers." Nations, led by the great powers, allied 
themselves in such manner as to keep the opposing 



THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 1$ 

sets of interests at about equal strength. If you 
expect to make a successful aggressive war, you must 
have a superiority of forces. Two nations about 
even in military resources are not likely to fight. 
The risk of failure is too great. And so with two 
alliances. But all this time, another current was 
running strongly among European nations. Each 
alliance was struggling to build up stronger poten- 
tial power than the other. This helped when, as 
happened every four or five years, there rose a 
visible conflict of interests. The stronger you were 
in a military way, the stronger would be the situa- 
tion of your diplomats. Every year, the European 
"race of armaments" grew more intense. 

Expressed in less abstract terms, this was the 
general state of Europe during the forty or fifty 
years which followed the Franco-Prussian war: 

On the Continent, military conscription had be- 
come universal. If Great Britain did not follow, it 
was because she, an island kingdom, was checking 
armies with an unprecedented navy. On the Conti- 
nent, every young man must serve his two or three 
years with the colors, learning to be a modern sol- 
dier. Retired to the Reserve, he must at intervals 
drop his work and drill again, in order "to keep 
his sword bright." The financial burden of arming 
this soldier grew even greater. As I shall presently 
show, weapons of warfare never until recently im- 
proved so fast as industrial tools; but they did im- 
prove almost too rapidly for the finances of the 



16 THE NEXT WAR 

nations. The Germans decided that a repeating 
rifle could be used with advantage in infantry tac- 
tics; the French must scrap from five to ten million 
single-shot rifles and replace them by repeaters. 
When the British proved that a battleship of unpre- 
cedented size entirely armed with big guns could 
thrash any small battleship armed with guns of 
mixed calibres, all existing battleships were headed 
toward the junk-yard, and the rival nations must 
build dreadnoughts. When France worked out a field- 
gun unprecedented for accuracy and rapidity of fire, 
thousands of German field-guns must go to the melt- 
ing-pot or to museums, to be replaced by imitations 
of the French "soixante-quinze." And the expense 
of these improvements increased almost in arith- 
metical ratio. A repeating rifle, with its compli- 
cated mechanism, cost much more than a smooth 
bore. "First-line" ships for modern navies cost in 
the seventies one or two million dollars; a crack 
dreadnought costs now a matter of forty or fifty 
million dollars. The burden of taxation weighed 
heavier and ever heavier on the common man and 
woman of Europe. There were signs just before the 
Great War that the race of armament was slowing 
up. Nations seemed to hesitate about adopting 
obvious but costly improvements. The true cause 
back of this, doubtless, was that taxation was reach- 
ing the "point of saturation" — for peace times at 
least. Agitation against military service began to 
make itself heard. It took two years from the work- 





OBSOLETE ARMAMENT 

The U S. S. Indiana, before and after it became a target for 
the 14-inch rifles of the superdreadnought Oklahoma 

The Indiana cost $5,800,000 when built. The latest super- 
dreadnoughts cost at least $40,000,000. 



THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 17 

ing life of every able-bodied young man; and its 
obvious end was not creation of wealth, but 
destruction. 

But the nations in general could not let go, even 
had their statesmen desired to renounce "Financial 
Imperialism" and its buttress of great standing 
armies. If for no other reason, because Germany 
sat in the centre of Europe, unconverted to any 
theories which involved military disarmament; and 
England sat behind her sea walls, afraid of any 
theories which involved naval disarmament. But 
Germany was setting the pace. She had learned 
the "lesson" of the Franco-Prussian war — a "nation 
in arms," an army methodically, scientifically pre- 
pared from its boots to its plan of campaign, eter- 
nally ready for that sudden stroke which catches the 
enemy unprepared. Scientific military preparation- 
had laid the foundations for the prosperity and 
greatness of modern Germany. More scientific prepa- 
ration — more prosperity and greatness ! That Ger- 
man genius for organization, scarcely suspected be- 
fore 1870, sprang into full blaze. And the army 
was organized into every German institution. The 
state schools educated the children to make them not 
only good citizens and efficient workers, but also 
good soldiers. With a skill and thoroughness which 
was the marvel of its time, Germany wove the army 
into the fabric of civilian life. Her state railways 
were laid down not only for commercial needs but 
also with a view to moving great bodies of troops 



18 THE NEXT WAR 

toward any critical point on the frontiers. Her great 
steel works, making and exporting the tools and 
machinery of civilian life, could be changed over with 
a minimum of trouble into factories for munitions 
of war. She specialized, indeed, on munition making 
— furnished the rifles and cannon for the little wars 
of the far countries. 

The "psychological preparation" imposed by the 
rulers of Germany was just as thorough. A state- 
controlled pulpit, a state-controlled press, state-con- 
trolled teachers and university professors, ham- 
mered or insinuated into the German people exag- 
gerated, conceited patriotism and the thought of, 
war — the "Religion of Valor." With the national 
talent for intellectual speculation, the Germans of 
the governing class worked out a philosophy which 
sounds quaint to practical-minded Americans, but 
upon which men lived and died. The state was a 
thing with a soul. It was the duty of the subject, 
his highest end, to advance the glory and interest of 
the state, no matter if that glory made every 
subject poorer and less happy. We, of course, look 
upon the state as a means of getting together and 
promoting the happiness and security of its mem- 
bers. If it does not generally have that result, it is 
nothing. When it comes to promoting the interests 
of the state — this philosophy held — all ordinary 
rules of morals are off. Acts like theft, murder, un- 
chastity, cruelty, calling for severe punishment when 



THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 19 

performed against other citizens of the state, became 
holy when performed for the state. 

War was the highest manifestation of the state, 
the supreme act which gave it glory, the opportunity 
for the subject to prove his devotion. War was good 
in itself. It was, first of all, natural. All biological 
life was a struggle. The weak went down, the 
strong survived; by this process the species evolved 
and improved. So, the weaker races go down be- 
fore the stronger, for the improvement of the human 
breed*. Of course, your own race was the strongest, 
the most worthy of survival. Races grew soft in 
peace, strong in war. The talk about doing away 
with warfare was "immoral, unnatural, degrading." 

Such, briefly, were the ideas upon which Germany 
was being fed. We all know that, I suppose. Most 
of us have heard of Bernhardi and his book "Ger- 
many and the Next War" — the extreme expression 
of this view. What we do not perhaps appreciate 
is that such opinions were not peculiar to Germany. 
In the Great War, in the settlement after the Great 
War, Europe was divided not only by a horizontal 

*I shall treat later on of other articles of this faith but this 
one might as well be nailed here and now. Admitting what is 
popularly called the Darwinian theory of the origin of species 
through survival of the fittest, evolutionists still doubt whether man 
did not free himself from the law of evolution at the moment when 
he fashioned the first tool, built the first fire. From that time, he 
became not the creature of his environment, but its master. But 
even if the man-species still lives, grows and improves by the 
law of evolution, the struggle for existence is, in the natural, ani- 
mal state, between individual and individual, not between tribe 
and tribe, horde and horde. This is like many other militarist 
arguments; it is neither true nor scientific; it only seems so. 



20 THE NEXT WAR 

line between Entente Allies and Germanic Allies, but 
by a vertical line between the aristocratic element 
and the democratic element. The set of ideas which 
I have quoted above were distinctly aristocratic in 
their aims and origins; by an aristocracy in secure 
control they were disseminated. But the other 
European aristocracies held exactly the same view — 
not so logically worked out perhaps, not so frankly 
expressed, but the same at the bottom. Lord 
Roberts, the venerable and respected British gen- 
eral, issued a kind of manifesto at the beginning of 
the war. Less brutal and feverish in expression, it is 
in thought the same thing as the mouthings of the 
German Junkers. "War is necessary for the souls of 
people," he said in effect; "it is the tonic of races." 
You heard the same sentiments from the French Gen- 
eral Staff. The difference was only this: whereas in 
the Entente countries the democratic idea kept a 
balance with the aristocratic as in Great Britain and 
Italy, or maintained the ascendence as in France, 
the aristocratic element held in Germany the con- 
trol over government, over most material activities, 
over most sources of public opinion. Germany, said 
the aristocrats of the neutral European nations, had 
made aristocracy scientific, brought it up to date, 
showed how it could be fastened on to a modern 
state. That was why these neutral aristocracies 
were one and all pro-German. 

There were German dissenters, of course. There 
were in fact many of them, as the Social Democratic 



THE BREEDING OF CALAMITY 21 

vote showed in 1913, the Revolution in 191 8. But 
their dissent was as yet ineffective. Probably the 
majority of Germans believed in this Religion of 
Valor which they had learned with their Christian 
prayers. Certainly the majority believed that the 
intensive, perpetual preparation for instant war was 
a necessity to a nation "ringed with enemies." The 
preparation went on, ever and ever more burden- 
some and complex. So did the propaganda, the 
"mental preparation." By 19 14, the Germans pub- 
lished and read more books on war than all the other 
nations of the world put together. "The man who 
builds the ship will want to sail it," say the nautical 
experts. And the man who forges the sword will 
want to wield it. By 19 14, the mine was laid and 
ready. With their "financial imperialism," their 
"concert of the powers," their race for dominating 
armament, all the European nations were responsi- 
ble for that. The assassination of an Austrian 
prince, a mere police court case, lit the fuse. Acci- 
dent alone was responsible for that. The fuse might 
have been trampled out; but the Kaiser and his 
counsellors held back, held others back. Germany 
was responsible for that — Germany and an aristo- 
cratic, militarist system, "prepared to the last 
buckle." On the day of mobilization, the French 
conscripts went to their appointed places sober or 
pale or weeping according to their individual char- 
acters. The first young British volunteers marched 
to the recruiting offices with a solemn consecration 



22 THE NEXT WAR 

in their faces, as men who go to take a sacrament. 
The Germans rushed to arms shouting and singing. 
During the early days of the Belgian invasion a Ger- 
man Junker officer, who seemed well informed upon 
events within the enemy lines, spoke to me with 
tears of pride in his eyes concerning this contrast. 
"Ah, Germany was beautiful — beautiful!" he said. 



CHAPTER III 

SECOND YPRES 

So the nations went to war, armed to the teeth, 
ready as nations never were before. It was to be 
a supreme struggle; all intelligent Europe knew 
that. Every available ounce of national resource, 
human material and energy was necessary to victory. 
If the rest did not understand, Germany soon taught 
them. And from the beginning, the "code of civi- 
lized warfare" began to melt away. In the first 
week, Great Britain and Germany both violated its 
spirit if not its letter. It was provided in the code 
that when siege was laid to a city the non-combatants 
must have a chance to get away in order to escape 
starvation as well as bombardment. With her domi- 
nant navy, England at once put a food-blockade on 
Germany. She knew that Germany produced but 
80 per cent of her own food; and that this was done 
only through intensive fertilization and the em- 
ployment in harvest and plowing time of a million 
and a half Russian laborers. The state of war would 
reduce the supply of fertilizers, would cut off the 
Russian laborers, would take from the land most of 
the domestic laborers. It was possible, other means 

23 



24 THE NEXT WAR 

failing, to starve out Germany, the weakest civilian 
baby as well as the strongest soldier. From the 
first day of the war — in plan if not at once in ac- 
tion — Germany prepared in the same way to starve 
out the British Isles with submarines. When she 
applied her submarine campaign, Germany violated 
at once an old article of the code which provided 
that merchant ships, about to be sunk for carrying 
contraband, must be warned and searched and that 
their crews must be allowed to escape. She began 
to sink without warning. If Germany abandoned 
this method in 19 15, it was only because the United 
States protested, and she feared to drag us into 
the war against her. She resumed her original plan 
in 19 1 7, and we did enter the war. 

It was provided in the code that civilians should 
be given warning of a bombardment. But the aero- 
planes had arrived; and aeroplane tactics depend not 
only upon speed but upon surprise. In the first 
fortnight of the war and as unexpectedly as a bolt 
of lightning from a clear sky, a German Taube ap- 
peared over Paris, dropped a bomb which blew in 
the front of a shop and killed two civilian butchers 
peacefully wrapping up meat. Germany invaded 
Belgium. As part of her long-studied plan for keep- 
ing everything serene on her line of communica- 
tions against France, she seized as hostages a few 
leading citizens of each town through which she 
passed, shot them if the town did not behave. And 
the taking of hostages had been so long abrogated 



SECOND YPRES 25 

by the code that a French Encyclopedia of War is- 
sued in the sixties of the last century defined it as 
"a usage of barbarous and semi-civilized warfare, 
for centuries discontinued by civilized nations." The 
"code" was going fast. A structure of merciful if 
superficial ethics which had been three centuries 
building was toppled over in two weeks. 

Eight months later, humanity arrived at a date as 
significant in our annals, I think, as October 12, 
1492 or July 4, 1776. It is April 22, 1915, during 
the Second Battle of Ypres. That day, the Germans 
rolled across the Western trench-line a cloud of 
iridescent chlorine gas which sent French, Arab, 
English and Canadian soldiers by the thousands 
back to the hospitals, coughing and choking them- 
selves to death from rotted, inflamed lungs. Had 
the German General Staff possessed imagination 
enough to use gas wholesale instead of retail on that 
day, they might have won their war then and there. 

The significance of the second Battle of Ypres 
needs explanation. 

Through all the centuries of mechanical and scien- 
tific improvement, military armament — the means of 
killing men — had lagged behind. The primitive man 
killed in war by hitting his opponent with a hard 
substance — a club or stone. Later, he sharpened the 
stone so that it would more readily reach a vital spot, 
and had a knife or a sword. He mounted the knife 
on a stick to give himself greater reach, and had a 
spear. He discovered the projecting power of the 



26 THE NEXT WAR 

bow, which would send a small spear beyond his 
own reach. Gunpowder arrived; that gave still 
further and more powerful projection. But the 
principle, the one method of killing a man in war, 
remained the same — hit him with something hard. 
We had learned many ways of controlling and trans- 
muting for the purposes of ordinary life the power 
stored up by the sun — steam, electricity, the energy 
of falling water. Military science knew but one 
way — the explosion of chemicals. If we look into 
a battleship, that "great, floating watch," we marvel 
at the intricacy of her machinery. But we should 
find that the engines, the turbines, the delicate and 
complicated electrical instruments, are all devices 
first invented for purely industrial activities and 
merely adapted for war. We should find the guns, 
the actual killing instrument, among the simplest 
machines on board. In centuries of mechanical in- 
vention and mechanical improvement, very little 
higher intelligence and no genius at all had been put 
into the mechanics of killing men. 

There were good reasons. The men who dis- 
covered the great principles back of modern machin- 
ery and industrial method, such as Newton in physics, 
Friar Bacon and Faraday in chemistry, Ampere and 
Volta in electricity, were concerned only with pure 
science, with extending the field of human knowledge. 
The clever inventors and adapters — such as 
Stephenson with his locomotive, Morse with his tele- 
graph, Edison with his electric light and phono- 



SECOND YPRES 27 

graph, Marconi with his wireless, Langley and the 
Wrights with their aeroplanes — were concerned with 
improving the civilian processes of production and 
transportation, or with adding material richness to 
modern life. Those who, in biology and kindred 
sciences, followed the paths blazed by the giants of 
the nineteenth century, were even more directly 
benevolent in their ends. Ehrlich and Takamine 
worked to save, preserve and lengthen human life. 
No first-class scientific mind was interested in re- 
search having for its end to destroy human life. 

Nor did the military caste, whose business — 
stripped of all its gold lace and brass buttons — was 
to kill, add anything fundamental to the science of 
destruction. It is traditional that what few real 
improvements there have been in armament, such as 
the machine-gun and the submarine, were invented 
by civilians and by them sold to armies. Military 
life tends to destroy originality. It makes for dar- 
ing action, makes against daring thought. In the 
second place, there was the code. Professional sol- 
diers wanted, sincerely wanted, to render warfare 
as merciful as possible. They shrank from carrying 
the thing out to its logical conclusion. Killing by 
gas had been theoretically proposed long before the 
war; and most military men had repudiated the idea. 
They had even fixed their objection in the stern 
agreements of the Second Hague Conference. 

But from April 22, 191 5 that agreement and all 
similar agreements were abrogated. The Germans 



28 THE NEXT WAR 

had found a new method, with enormous possibili- 
ties, for killing men. This weapon was powerful 
enough to win the war, if the Allies refused to reply 
in kind. They did reply in kind. From that mo- 
ment, to use the language of the streets, the lid was 
off. Nations, instead of merely armies, were by now 
mobilized for war. Those great and little scientific 
minds, engaged hitherto in searching for abstract 
truth or in multiplying the richness of life and the 
wealth of nations, could be turned toward the inven- 
tion of means of destruction whether they wished 
or no. A new area of human consciousness was 
brought to fruition. A new power in men was un- 
loosed and this one most sinister. Its established 
past performances, its probable future results, I 
shall consider elsewhere. 

This release and stimulation of the human imagi- 
nation for the business of killing was perhaps the 
main social event of the Great War. But I hinted 
at another almost equally important when I said 
above that nations instead of armiesi were now 
mobilized for war. 

The Germans had entered Armageddon with an 
unprecedented equipment of munitions. The elec- 
tric-minded French perceived at once, the slower- 
minded British only a little later, that this was to 
be a war of factories as well as of men and bent all 
their resources toward organizing the national life 
for this purpose. Every woman enlisted in muni- 



SECOND YPRES 29 

tions-making, in agriculture, in clerical work for the 
business offices of war, released a soldier to the 
Front. Women were drawn in by the thousands, later 
by the millions. At the end of the war Great 
Britain, homeland and Colonies together, had in 
arms less than five million soldiers; but homeland 
and Colonies together were employing three million 
women in the direct processes of war, besides mil- 
lions of others who gave as volunteers a part of their 
time. It became a stock statement that if the women 
of either side should quit their war-work, that side 
would lose. 

Now since munitions and food had grown as im- 
portant as men, since to stop or hinder the enemy 
munitions manufacture or agricultural production 
was to make toward victory, the women in war were 
fair game. Near London stood the great Woolwich 
munition works and armory, turning out guns, ex- 
plosives and shells. Probably before the end of the 
war, as many women worked there as men. It was 
raided again and again by German aircraft. Why 
not? Totally to destroy the Woolwich works would 
be equivalent for purposes of victory to destroying 
several divisions. The old code was logical for its 
time when it forbade the killing of women and other 
non-combatants. Then, killing a woman had no 
point. Now it had a most significant point. 

The same stern logic of "military necessity" lay 
behind the continual air raids on cities, fortified and 



30 THE NEXT WAR 

unfortified. Germany began this process. She was 
in a position to do so. She held the advanced lines. 
Her front was only seventy miles from the capital 
and metropolis of France, less than a hundred from 
that of Britain, whereas, to attack Berlin, the En- 
tente Allies must travel by air nearly four hundred 
miles. Tons of illogically sentimental propaganda 
have been published concerning these air-raids. In 
the beginning, the intention was, on any standard 
barbarous, cruel, and stupid. The German General 
Staff, rich in scientific knowledge but poor in the 
understanding of human nature, thought by this 
means to "break down the resistance" of the hostile 
peoples, to bully them into a submissive attitude. In 
this they failed utterly; air raids had rather the effect 
of lashing the French and British into increased 
effort. 

But the raids were continued for a more prac- 
tical purpose. The nerve-centres of war are in the 
great cities, and mainly in the capitals. Suppose 
for an extreme example that the Germans in one 
overwhelming raid or a series of raids had destroyed 
Paris. All the main railroad lines which supplied 
the army at the front ran through Paris. There, 
the trains were switched, rearranged and made up. 
In Paris also were the headquarters of those in- 
numerable bureaus vitally necessary to the conduct 
of modern war, with all its complexities and co- 
ordinations. Had the railroad connections been 
destroyed, had the bureaus lost their quarters, their 



SECOND YPRES 31 

books, their personnel, the French army at the front 
must have been thrown into confusion. 

By the same token the more they approximated 
to this end, the more the air-bombardments made 
toward victory. Both Parisians and Londoners have 
expressed to me the opinion that the Gotha raids 
and the Big Bertha bombardments were "worth 
while" for the effect they had on the business of life. 
"There's no use in denying," said an Englishman, 
"that we did less work than usual — at least a quarter 
less — on the days of air raids." 

Still further: defence against air-raids is very dif- 
ficult; so the French, for example, were forced to 
hold back from the Front in order to defend their 
capital scores of aeroplanes and many batteries of 
guns, whereas the Germans seldom raided with more 
than a dozen aeroplanes. That factor alone made 
air raids useful for strictly military ends. When 
the Allies began raiding German cities in 19 17 and 
1 91 8, when they prepared to raid Berlin on an un- 
precedented scale in that campaign of 19 19 which 
never occurred, they were not mainly inspired by 
revenge, as horror-stricken German civilians and 
war-heated Allied civilians asserted. The General 
Staff were after results, not personal satisfaction. 
They knew that aeroplane raids on cities brought 
military results. Still further; they knew that armies 
exist and operate for the defence of peoples. The 
object of wars, after all, is not the destruction of 
armies. It is the subjugation of peoples. In strik- 



32 THE NEXT WAR 

ing at the great cities they were striking, a little 
blindly as yet but still directly, at the heart of 
resistance. 

Of course, when you attack, and bombard a city 
without warning — and an air raid, to be effective 
must come without warning — you include in the 
circle of destruction every living thing in that city, 
the weakest non-combatant with the strongest sol- 
dier. "Baby killers" the Londoners called the Zep- 
pelins. They were just that; for baby-killing had 
become incidental to military necessity. 

Let me here add another departure from the 
"code," less significant than the new ways of 
killing and the inclusion of all civilians in the 
circle of destruction, but still important to human- 
ity. Under its spirit, usually under the letter, an 
army destroyed property only when that destruc- 
tion would weaken the enemy's armed forces and his 
general military resistance. Sherman's devastation 
during his march to the sea was ruthless and terrible, 
and is not yet forgotten in the South. But it had a 
direct military object — to render impossible the pro- 
visioning of the Confederate Army. The Germans, 
setting the pace, carried the logic of destruction one 
stage further. In their early rush they had taken 
and held securely the coal mines of Northern 
France. Those mines, yielding half of the French 
native coal supply, they deliberately flooded and de- 
stroyed. This had no immediate military purpose. 
In German hands, the mines were useless to the 



SECOND YPRES 33 

French army. No, the German General Staff wanted 
simply to weaken France permanently, to make that 
part which they did not seize in their proposed 
German peace a subject nation commercially. The 
collapse of the Germans in 19 18 was so sudden that 
the Allies did not enter her territory while in a state 
of war and it is impossible to say that they would 
not, in other circumstances, have followed the gen- 
eral rule of war and replied in kind. 

Let me go no further with all this, but summarize : 
"The Code," a merciful though artificial body of 
ethics, built up by Christianity and all other hu- 
manitarian forces through two thousand years of 
warfare, had collapsed. In most respects, we were 
back to the ethics of the barbarian hordes. The bar- 
barians of the twentieth century B. C. killed in any 
manner which their imaginations suggested; so now 
did civilized men of the twentieth century A. D. 
The barbarian of the twentieth century B. C. killed 
the women and children of the enemy as tribal self- 
interest seemed to dictate; as now did the civilized 
men of the twentieth century A. D. The barbarians 
of the twentieth century B. C. made slaves of the 
conquered people or forced them to pay tribute; so 
virtually — in such acts as the destruction of the 
French mines — did civilized men of the twentieth 
century A. D. 

In only two important respects did the code still 
stand when we emerged from the Great War of 
19 14-18. We were generally sparing prisoners, 



34 THE NEXT WAR 

granting life to those who gave up resistance and 
surrendered. But would this article have stood in 
case the war went on? Germany held several mil- 
lions of French, British, Belgian, Italian and Rus- 
sian prisoners. At an ever-increasing pace, she was 
being starved out. Suppose she had elected to de- 
fend herself literally to the last life, as besieged 
cities have often done? With an underfed army, 
with civilians dropping dead of starvation in the 
streets — what of the prisoners? She could not send 
them back to multiply the number of her enemies. 
She could not dump them into the adjacent neutral 
nations to devour their scanty supplies of food. 
Rather than face this, Switzerland or Holland 
would have entered the war against Germany. What 
might have become of the prisoners? 

Only one article of the code stood firm. With 
occasional violations, the "right of the wounded" 
was respected. Speaking generally, both sides 
spared the hospitals. 

And with the break-down of "the code," another 
sinister factor, unknown to the barbarians, had en- 
tered warfare — that exact scientific method of re- 
search which has wrought all our miracles of in- 
dustry was at the service of the warriors. The cur- 
rent of scientific work and thought, flowing hitherto 
toward improvement of mankind, was now dammed; 
it was flowing backward, toward the destruction of 
mankind. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE NEW WARFARE 

Now let us take up one by one the new factors in 
warfare introduced by the Great War of 19 14-18, 
and see what effects they had on that war, what 
inevitable or probable effects on "the next war." 
To make it all easier to follow, let us begin with that 
factor which we can grasp most readily — the busi- 
ness of killing. Here, in treating of the past, I shall 
take testimony of the war itself mostly from my 
own direct or second-hand observations, extending 
from the Battle of Mons to the Battle of the Ar- 
gonne ; and in speculating on the future mostly from 
the sayings and writings of professional soldiers, 
many of them — though not all — thorough believers 
in militarism and "the next war." 

After the Second Battle of Ypres lifted the lid, 
those men of science, those high technicians, who had 
put themselves at the service of armies, experi- 
mented with new methods of killing. Liquid flame 
— burning men alive — was introduced on the West- 
ern front. This proved of only limited usefulness. 
The British introduced the tanks. These were im- 
portant to the general change in warfare, as I shall 

35 



36 THE NEXT WAR 

show later; but they added nothing to the direct 
process of destroying life. Gas seemed by all odds 
the most promising of the new weapons. That 
simple chlorine which the Germans used in 19 15 
gave place to other gases more complex and more 
destructive to human body-cells. At first released 
only in clouds and dependent upon a favorable wind 
for their, effect, the chemicals which generated these 
gases were later loaded into shells and projected 
miles beyond any danger to the army which employed 
them. 

As gas improved, so did the defence against it. 
The crude mouth-pads, consisting of a strip of gauze 
soaked in "anti-chlorine" chemicals, which the 
women of England rushed to the Front after Second 
Ypres, were succeeded by more secure and cumber- 
some masks. The standard mask worn by the 
Americans in 19 18 was a complex machine. It was 
cleverly constructed to fit the face air-tight; its tank 
held antidotes for all known German gases. How- 
ever, this was an imperfect protection, because men 
could not or would not wear it all the time. It took 
the sternest discipline to make troops keep on their 
masks even in time of danger. Surprise gas-bom- 
bardments were always catching them unmasked. A 
slight leak was fatal. In that stage of chemical 
warfare, the losses from gas-shells in proportion to 
the quantity used, were at least as great as those 
from high-explosive shells. 

Yet the mask was a protection; let us therefore 



THE NEW WARFARE 37 

study to beat it. In the spring attack of 19 18, the 
Germans introduced their "mustard gas." Unlike 
its forerunners, it was poisonous to the skin as well 
as to the lungs. Breathed, it was deadly; where it 
touched the skin, it produced terrible burns which 
resisted all ordinary treatment. These wounds were 
not fatal unless they covered great areas of the body. 
In that, mustard gas was unsatisfactory. 

Now in all the experiments following Second 
Ypres, the chemists had in mind three qualities of the 
ideal killing gas. First, it should be invisible, thus 
introducing the element of surprise. The early, 
crude gases, even in small quantities, betrayed their 
presence by the tinge they gave the atmosphere. 
Second, it should be a little heavier than the atmos- 
phere; it should tend to sink, so as to penetrate 
dugouts and cellars. Third, it should poison — not 
merely burn — all exposed areas of the body. Ameri- 
can ingenuity solved the problem. At the time of 
the Armistice, we were manufacturing for the cam- 
paign of 19 19 our Lewisite gas. It was invisible; 
it was a sinking gas, which would search out the 
refugees of dugouts and cellars; if breathed, it killed 
at once — and it killed not only through the lungs. 
Wherever it settled on the skin, it produced a poison 
which penetrated the system and brought almost 
certain death. It was inimical to all cell-life, ani- 
mal or vegetable. Masks alone were of no use 
against it. Further, it had fifty-five times the 
"spread" of any poison gas hitherto used in the war. 



38 THE NEXT WAR 

An expert has said that a dozen Lewisite air bombs 
of the greatest size in use during 191 8 might with 
a favorable wind have eliminated the population of 
Berlin. Possibly he exaggerated, but probably not 
greatly. The Armistice came ; but gas research went 
on. Now we have more than a hint of a gas beyond 
Lewisite. It cannot be much more deadly; but in 
proportion to the amount of chemical which gen- 
erates it, the spread is far greater. A mere capsule 
of this gas in a small grenade can generate square 
rods and even acres of death in the absolute. . . . 

So much at present for gas. It is the new factor, 
the one which may hold the greatest promise for fu- 
ture improvement in war. But there has been much 
improvement in certain methods already known and 
used, which in future wars may be auxiliary to 
gas. There was the old, stock, weapon of modern 
wars — the tube from which hard substances were 
projected by chemical explosion — in short, the gun. 
In proportion to initial cost, the power of the gun 
and of the auxiliary explosion its chemical had in- 
creased enormously. The smokeless TNT and other 
high explosives employed in this war were but 
little more expensive, pound for pound, than the old 
black powder of past wars; in effect they were in- 
comparably more destructive. Men in war defended 
themselves against this increased destructive power 
by an old method made new; they burrowed deep 
into the inert earth. But even at that, destruction 
proceeded faster than the defence against destruc- 



THE NEW WARFARE 39 

tion — hence the unprecedented death-list of this war. 

When we came to the vital element of property 
— the accumulated wealth of the world — we find 
the disparity between cost and effect much greater. 

Let us reason here by example : the battle of 
Waterloo, whose glories and horrors Europe sang 
for a hundred years, resolved itself at one stage into 
a struggle for Hougoumont Chateau. All through 
the battle, French and British regiments, supported 
by artillery, were fighting for that group of buildings. 
The guide to the Chateau points out to the tourist 
the existing marks of artillery fire and the restora- 
tions. A corner knocked off from the chapel, a tiny 
outhouse battered down, a few holes in the walls no 
bigger at most than a wash-tub — that is the extent of 
the damage. Now while it is impossible to make an 
accurate estimate, it is still quite certain that the 
damage to Hougoumont Chateau was smaller in 
money value than the cost of the cannon-balls, shells 
and gun-powder which caused it. By contrast : dur- 
ing 19 1 6, the Germans dropped into the town of 
Nancy some of their 380-millimetre shells — the larg- 
est and most expensive generally used in the war. 
The cost of such shells was probably between three 
and four thousand dollars. I was in Nancy during 
one such bombardment, when a big school house was 
hit directly. It seemed literally to have melted. In 
restoring it after the war, the French had to re- 
build from the ground. And that school house cost 
more than two hundred thousand dollars. As a gen- 



40 THE NEXT WAR 

eral rule, when a shell of the Great War bit a build- 
ing, it destroyed much more value in property than 
its own cost plus that of its projecting charge. The 
shells which missed are aside from this discussion; 
for the artillerymen of Napoleon's army missed just 
as often in proportion. 

Yet Nature always imposes limits on human in- 
genuity. We arrive at a point beyond which we 
cannot much further improve any given device. Mili- 
tary experts generally agree that we have about 
reached that impasse with guns and their explosive 
projectiles. The "Big Bertha" which bombarded 
Paris from a distance of seventy miles was only an 
apparent exception. It was not a real improvement; 
it was a "morale gun," useful to the "psychological 
campaign" of the Germans. It had no accuracy; 
the gunners "ranged" it on Paris in general, and 
the shells, according to atmospheric conditions, fell 
anywhere over an area some four or five miles across. 

No; there will be no great improvements in guns 
and high-explosive projectiles. Even if we have not 
reached the limit of invention, other methods of de- 
stroying life and property hold out much more 
promise. Among these is the aeroplane. There, 
we have not nearly reached the barrier set by Na- 
ture upon Ingenuity. 

A modern weapon works by two distinct processes 
— the projection, which sends the death-tool far into 
the region of the enemy and the action — usually 
some kind of explosion — by which it kills. The 




ARTILLERY FIRE IN 1815 
Hougoumont Chateau. During the Battle of Waterloo, it was 
bombarded all day by Napoleon's cannon. Result: A small out- 
building wrecked (ruin in the foreground), a corner at the peak 
of the chapel (to the left) knocked off, and some small holes, since 
repaired, in the front wall9 and the roofs. 




ARTILLERY FIRE IN 1915 
A chateau in Northern France. It was wrecked by a single 
big-calibre German shell. 



THE NEW WARFARE 41 

bombing aeroplane is essentially an instrument of 
projection. It extends "range" beyond any distance 
possible to a gun. The army aeroplanes of 19 14 
were, in 19 16, mentioned by the aviators as "those 
old-fashioned 'busses'." In 19 18, airmen employed 
similar scornful language concerning the machines 
of 19 1 6. However, the range of the 19 14 aero- 
planes greatly excelled that of any gun; they could 
venture at least a hundred miles from their bases. 
By 19 1 8, they were venturing two or three hundred 
miles; and the Allied armies planned, in the spring 
of 19 19, to make regular raids on Berlin, some four 
hundred miles away. 

To adopt again the terminology of artillery; as 
the aeroplane grew in range, so did it grow in 
calibre. The bombs dropped on Paris in 19 14 were 
not much bigger than a grape-fruit; the bombs pre- 
pared for Berlin in 19 19 were eight feet high and 
carried half a ton of explosive or gas-generating 
chemicals. Not only were they greater in them- 
selves than any gun-shell, but they carried a heav- 
ier bursting-charge in proportion to their size. As 
you increase the calibre and range of a gun, you 
must increase the thickness of the steel casing which 
forms the shell, and correspondingly reduce the pro- 
portion of explosives or gas-forming chemical. But 
an air bomb — which is dropped, not fired — needs 
only a very thin casing. A big shell is in bulk mostly 
steel; an air bomb is mostly chemical. It was in 
shells like these that we would have packed our 



42 THE NEXT WAR 

Lewisite gas had we decided to "eliminate all life 
in Berlin." 

However, air-bombardment was during the Great 
War essentially inaccurate. A gun, in land opera- 
tions, is fired from a solid base; the artilleryman 
can aim at his leisure. A bomb is dropped from a 
base which is not only in rapid motion but par- 
takes of the instability of the air; the bombing avi- 
ator must make an inconceivably rapid snapshot. 
Still, even at this crude stage, air-fire grew much 
more accurate. In 19 14 and 191 5, the bombs sel- 
dom hit their objective, unless that objective were 
a city in general. By 19 18, they were usually hit- 
ting on or near their targets. It was still, however, 
mostly a matter of individual skill, not of accurate 
machine-work. 

Then, just before the Armistice, an American, 
binding together many inventions made by civilians 
for civilian purposes, showed a dazzling way to the 
warfare of the future. He proved that aeroplanes, 
flying without pilots, could be steered accurately 
by wireless. This meant that the aeropiane had 
become a super-gun. Calibre was increased in- 
definitely. An aeroplane could now carry explo- 
sive-charges or gas-charges up to its whole lift- 
ing capacity of many tons. It was no longer merely 
a vehicle; it could be virtually a self-propelling shell. 
And in the matter of accuracy, the uncertain human 
factor was nearly eliminated, as happens in most 
highly-improved machines. An expert on this kind 




THE INCREASING SIZE OF BOMBS 

(Left) A bomb in 1 914-15. A sample of the largest aerial 
bomb used at the beginning of the war. 

(Right) A bomb in 1918. This bomb carried an explosive 
charge of one ton, and was prepared to bomb Berlin in 1919. 



THE NEW WARFARE 43 

of marksmanship, hovering in an aeroplane or 
Zepplin many miles away, with a fleet of protecting 
battle-planes guarding him to prevent hurried work- 
manship, could guide these explosive fleets to their 
objective whether town or fortress. Here, in effect, 
was a gun with a range as long as the width of Eu- 
ropean nations, a bursting charge beyond the previ- 
ous imaginations of gunnery. 



CHAPTER V 

TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 

Now before going further, let us pull together 
our argument, so far as it has gone. 

Here is a projectile — the bomb-carrying aero- 
plane — of unprecedented size and almost unlimited 
range; here is a killing instrument — gas — of a power 
beyond the dream of a madman; here is a scheme 
of warfare which inevitably draws those who were 
hitherto regarded as non-combatants into the cate- 
gory of fair game. We need but combine these three 
factors in our imaginations, and we have a prob- 
ability of "the next war" between civilized and pre- 
pared nations. It will be, in one phase, a war of 
aeroplanes loaded with gas shells. And professional 
military men in all lands are remarking among them- 
selves that the new warfare may — some say must — 
strike not only at armies but at the heart of the 
matter — peoples. 

A Prussian officer, of the old school said to his 
American captor in 191 8, "France is the sheepfold 
and Germany is the wolf. The French army is the 
shepherd's dog. The wolf fights the dog only in 
order to get at the sheep. It is the sheepfold we 

44 



TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 45 

want." Upon such sentiments the Allied world 
looked with some horror — then. Even the Ger- 
mans somewhat withheld their hands. I cannot find 
that gas-bombardment was ever used on the cities 
behind the lines. Yet the Germans were prepar- 
ing in 191 8 a step toward that method. Had the 
war continued, Paris would have been attacked 
from the air on a new plan. A first wave of aero- 
planes would have dropped on the city roofs tons 
of small bombs which released burning phosphorus 
— that flame cannot be extinguished by water. It 
would have started a conflagration against which the 
Fire Department would have been almost powerless, 
in a hundred quarters of the city. Into the light fur- 
nished by this general fire, the Germans proposed 
to send second and third waves of aeroplanes loaded 
with the heaviest bombs; they could pick their ob- 
jectives in the vital parts of the city as they could 
not during an ordinary moonlight raid. From that 
the gas-bombardment would have been but a step. I 
have shown what we might have done to Berlin in 
19 19 with giant bombs carrying Lewisite gas. The 
Allies, I can testify personally, did not intend to use 
this method "unless they had to." But the elimi- 
nation of civilians by the hundreds of thousands, 
perhaps by the millions, through gas bombardments, 
was a possibility had the war continued until 1920. 
In "the next war," this gas-bombardment of cap- 
itals and great towns is not only a possibility but 
a strong probability — almost a certainty. Military 



46 THE NEXT WAR 

staffs have had time to think, to carry out the changes 
and discoveries of the Great War to their logical 
conclusion. They see that even with the known 
gases, the existing aeroplanes, Paris, Rome or 
London could in one night be changed from a me- 
tropolis to a necroplis. If any military man hesi- 
tates to apply this method — and being human and 
having a professional dislike of killing civilians, he 
must hesitate — the thought of what the enemy might 
do drives him on to consideration of this plan of 
warfare, and to preparation. There are at this 
moment at least two elements in the world quite 
capable of turning this trick had they the means and 
control. The method is so effective that if you do 
not use it, some one else will. You must be pre- 
pared to counter, to reply in kind. 

Here are the words of a few authorities: 

Brigadier General Mitchell of the United States 
Army, pleading with the House Committee on ap- 
propriations for more defensive aeroplanes, said 
that "a few planes could visit New York as the cen- 
tral point of a territory ioo miles square every eight 
days and drop enough gas to keep the entire area 
inundated . . . 200 tons of phosgene gas could be 
laid every eight days and would be enough to kill 
every inhabitant." 

Captain Bradner, Chief of Research of the 
Chemical Warfare Service, said at a Congressional 
hearing: 

"One plane carrying two tons of the liquid [a 



TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 47 

certain gas-generating compound] could cover an 
area of 100 feet wide and 7 miles long, and could 
deposit enough material to kill every man in that 
area by action on his skin. It would be entirely pos- 
sible for this country to manufacture several thou- 
sand tons a day, provided the necessary plants had 
been built. If Germany had had 4,000 tons of this 
material and 300 or 400 planes equipped in this way 
for its distribution, the entire first American army 
would have been annihilated in 10 or 12 hours." 

Brevet Colonel J. F. C. Fuller this year won in 
England the Gold Medal of the Royal United 
Service Institution for his essay on the warfare of 
the future. All through, he avoids this topic of 
attacks on the civilian population; he is treating, 
like a true old-time military man, of armies alone. 
But Fuller says concerning the general possibilities 
of gas, which he believes to be the weapon of the 
future: "It is quite conceivable that many gases 
may be discovered which will penetrate all known 
gas armor. As there is no reason why one man 
should not be able to release 100 cylinders simul- 
taneously, there is no reason why he should not re- 
lease several million; in fact, these might be released 
in England today electrically by a one-armed cripple 
sitting in Kamchatka directly his indicator denoted 
a favorable wind." 

And Major-General E. D. Swinton, of the Brit- 
ish army, said in discussing Colonel Fuller's paper: 

"It has been rather our tendency up to the pres- 



48 THE NEXT WAR 

ent to look upon warfare from the retail point of 
view — of killing men by fifties or hundreds or thou- 
sands. But when you speak of gas . . . you must 
remember that you are discussing a weapon which 
must be considered from the wholesale point of view 
and if you use it — and I do not know of any reason 
why you should not — you may kill hundreds of 
thousands of men, or at any rate disable them." 

Here, perhaps, is the place to say that Lewisite 
and the gas beyond Lewisite are probably no longer 
the exclusive secret of the United States Govern- 
ment. We had allies in this war; doubtless they 
learned the formula. Even if not; once science knows 
that a formula exists, its rediscovery is only a mat- 
ter of patient research, not of genius. And gas- 
investigation is quietly going on abroad. If they 
have not arrived at the same substances, the chemists 
of Europe have worked out others just as deadly. 
The scientific investigation of the killing possibilities 
in gas is only four years old. 

Colonel Fuller says bluntly in his illuminating 
essay that the armies which entered the late war 
were antiquated human machines, that military 
brains had ossified. Warfare, he says, must be, will 
be, brought up to the standard of civilian technique. 
Henceforth, general staffs must not wait for un- 
stimulated civilians to invent new machines or meth- 
ods of attack and defence. They must mobilize high 
technicians and inventors in the "pause between 
wars" as well as in war, bend all their energies 



TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 49 

toward discovering new ways of killing. And vir- 
tually, that improvement in warfare is already be- 
gun. In the laboratories of Europe, — just as the 
farseeing prophesied after Second Ypres — men are 
studying new ways to destroy life. 

Scientific discovery involves the factors of leisure. 
To reach great things, a man cannot be hurried. 
War is all organized hurry. With both sides rac- 
ing for victory, the savants of Europe had not the 
leisure to reach out toward the unknown. They 
worked with poison gas; that was already discov- 
ered, and merely needed improvement. Now, in the 
pause since the Armistice, they are venturing into 
the unknown. Let us take testimony again from 
the public and official remarks of General Swinton: 

". . . ray warfare. I imagine from the progress 
that has been made in the past that in the future 
we will not have recourse to gas al'one, but will em- 
ploy every force of nature that we can; and there 
is a tendency at present for progress in the develop- 
ment of the different forms of rays that can be turned 
to lethal purposes. We foave X-rays, we have light 
rays, we have heat rays. . . . We may not be so 
very far from the development of some kinds of 
lethal ray which will shrivel up or paralyze or poison 
human beings . . . The final form of human strife, 
as I regard it, is germ warfare. I think it will come 
to that; and so far as I can see there is no reason 
why it should not, if you mean to fight. . . . pre- 
pare now ... we must envisage these new forms of 



50 THE NEXT WAR 

warfare, and as far as possible expend energy, time 
and money in encouraging our inventors and sci- 
entists to study the waging of war on a wholesale 
scale instead of . . . thinking so much about meth- 
ods which will kill a few individuals only at a time." 

In the war just finished, — according to neutral 
and scientifically dispassionate Danish historians — 
nearly ten million soldiers died in battle or of 
wounds; probably two or three million soldiers were 
permanently disabled. Yet we were killing only by 
retail, where in "the next war" we shall kill by 
wholesale. 

The same late war, according to those same Dan- 
ish statisticians, cost thirty million more human be- 
ings — mere civilians — "who might be living today." 
Yet taking Armageddon by and large, the weapons 
were deliberately turned against civilians with com- 
parative infrequency. Declining birth rates account 
for a part of those thirty millions. The rest, for 
the most part died of the "accidents," of such war- 
fare as we waged. If we except the Armenian mas- 
sacres, we find that only a small fraction of the total 
went to their graves through attacks aimed directly 
at their lives — as in the atrocities of the Hungarians 
against the Serbs, the Russians against the East 
Prussians, the Germans against the Belgians; or in 
attacks aimed indirectly at their lives — as in the 
submarine sinkings and air raids. Most of them 
died just because they were in the way of war — 
died of malnutrition in the blockaded countries, of 



Estimated Loss of Soldier Lives 


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TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 53 

starvation and exposure in the great treks away 
from invading armies. But now we are to have 
killing by wholesale instead of retail; and killing, 
unless I miss my guess, aimed directly at civilian 
populations. 

So much for civilian lives in "the next war." What 
about soldier lives, when we come to kill by whole- 
sale instead of by retail? The answer involves a 
discussion of military weapons, tactics and strategy 
in "the next war." 

I have not yet discussed the tank. Britain con- 
tributed that improvement, as Germany contributed 
gas. It involved the combination of one device al- 
most as old as warfare — armor — with two devices 
borrowed from the arts of peace — the gasolene 
engine and the caterpillar wheel. It was an instru- 
ment of the offensive in that it gave men and guns 
greater mobility; it was defensive in that it pro- 
tected soldiers and their weapons as they advanced 
into the enemy's territory. The British employed 
their tanks, as the Germans their gas, timidly and 
experimentally in the beginning. The wholesale 
use of tanks at the Somme in 191 6 would have won 
the war. The munition makers, in the two years 
between the Somme and the Armistice, somewhat 
improved this new weapon. The early types could 
advance only four or five miles an hour over ordinary 
rough ground — just the pace of a man at a brisk 
walk. The improved types could make ten or twelve 
miles an hour — practically, the speed of cavalry in 



54 THE NEXT WAR 

action. The tanks of the Somme carried merely 
machine-guns. Many of those used in the Battle 
of Liberation were armed with standard-calibre field- 
guns. Practically, there is no limit to the possible 
size of tanks. Munitions designers are preparing to 
build them bigger and bigger, just as naval designers 
have built warships bigger and bigger — from two 
hundred-ton caravels which fought the Armada to 
the 20,000-ton dreadnought. The "land battleship" 
will doubtless grow in bulk until expense sets a limit. 
And now, military experts are considering a new 
possibility of tanks. If a submarine warship may be 
rendered water-tight, so may a tank be rendered 
gas-tight. 

Poison gas, as I have repeated even to weariness, 
seems to be the killing weapon of the future. How- 
ever, the explosive shell is by no means out of date. 
It merely becomes more or less of an auxiliary to 
gas. Gas cannot batter down intrenchments and 
fortifications, destroy buildings, puncture masks or 
air-proof tanks and fortresses. The explosive shell 
will still blast the way; the gas will for the most 
part do the actual job of killing. Explosive-project- 
ing artillery will either be encased in tanks or, when 
it takes the open, generally mounted on the cater- 
pillar wheel, which gives it far greater mobility, even 
over rough country, than the swiftest horse-drawn 
artillery. Designers of tanks and modern gun-car- 
riages are of course studying to increase their speed. 
We may reasonably expect that even the heavy artil- 



TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 55 

lery will be able, by "the next war," to go twenty 
or twenty-five miles an hour. Hitherto, armies have 
needed roads in order to advance. But the caterpil- 
lar wheel makes artillery comparatively independent 
of highways. 

These, then, will probably be the tactics of the 
next war on land, provided that we make no great 
basic discovery in the art of killing, but only improve 
up to their best possibilities the instruments we have 
and know. The better to imagine the scene, let us 
repeat the situation of the last war, and imagine a 
thoroughly-prepared Germany attacking and trying 
to invade a thoroughly j prepared France. 

The attackers will probably dispense with a dec- 
laration of hostilities, following the precedent estab- 
lished by the Japanese in their war against Russia. 
"Wars will no longer be declared," says the Colonel 
Fuller so often quoted above, "but like a tropical 
tornado there will be a darkening of the sky, and 
then the flood. To dally over the declaration will 
be considered as foolish as a Fontenoy courtesy — a 
wave of a plumed hat — 'Gentlemen of France, fire 
first!'" Germany will start from her frontier an 
army of tanks, big and little, gas-proof, their guns 
provided with gas shells to kill, with explosive shells 
to open the way for killing. They will be backed by 
the heavy artillery on caterpillar trucks. The French 
will probably have a defence ready for this form 
of attack. Across their frontiers will stretch a line 
of retorts capable of setting up a lethal cloud four 



56 THE NEXT WAR 

hundred miles long — "from Switzerland to the sea.'" 
At the burst of hostilities, the French will loosen this 
defence; if it works perfectly, they will have leisure 
to mobilize. The Germans may elect to advance 
their force of gas-proof tanks through this cloud; 
they may wait for it to dissipate; they may have 
means to drive "alleys of immunity" through it, and 
so permit the passage of their forces. What method 
they try depends largely on the future of infantry; 
and that is still a moot point. 

Certain optimistic soldiers have registered the 
belief that the dense masses of infantry, which have 
been the backbone of all previous modern wars, will 
disappear from the new warfare. Tanks, the cavalry 
of the future, will win and lose battles. It will be 
impossible for any nation to manufacture enough 
tanks to contain its whole mobilizable force; there is 
not so much steel-making capacity in the world. 
Therefore, we shall come down again to compara- 
tively small professional armies of experts. 

Most soldiers with whom I have talked do not 
endorse this view. They think that nothing will 
ever wholly displace infantry. Artillery was king 
of battles in the late war; all national resources were 
bent toward making guns and still more guns, shells 
and still more shells. Yet the masses of infantry re- 
mained; the General Staffs were shrieking not only 
for more guns, but for more men. You wage war 
to occupy positions and territory; nothing can finally 
seize and hold positions and territory but great 



TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 57 

bodies of armed men. These soldiers to whom I 
have talked believe that this old, basic rule of war- 
fare will not change in the next war, any more than 
it changed in the late war. The infantryman may, 
however, abandon his rifle, and carry instead the 
shorter-ranged but far more deadly gas-grenade — 
though even the passing of the rifle, in its multiplied 
form of the machine-gun, seems doubtful. 

There is some question whether these masses of 
infantry will come directly to grips with each other. 
But that does not mean that they will not be killed 
"by wholesale, not by retail." They may be held 
back until the machines of war have stamped out 
resistance, and then brought up merely to hold the 
territory; but they will be constantly under attack 
from the air. 

For even before the tank-army starts toward that 
belt of lethal mist which marks the frontier, the air- 
fleets will be on their way. I have shown how un- 
manned aeroplanes may be directed by wireless, and 
so become projectiles of unimagined range and 
calibre. Such fleets, and other aircraft armed with 
machine-guns, high explosive bombs, gas-bombs, will 
search out the masses of waiting infantry. The de- 
fenders will fight these fleets with their own aero- 
planes; while the tanks are waging war on solid 
land, the aircraft will be engaged in a wholesale 
version of the retail air-holocausts which we knew 
in the late war. Whenever squadrons of these at- 
tacking aeroplanes get through to their objective, 



58 THE NEXT WAR 

whether bodies of soldiers or towns, they may make 
even the slaughter of Verdun seem by comparison 
like bow-and-arrow warfare. 

Such a war, probably, would not last long. That 
is not a certainty, however. One can imagine a 
drawn first attack; a situation where after incredible 
slaughter and destruction on both sides, the bel- 
ligerents would settle down to a war of gas on the 
frontiers and of aeroplane raids on the towns, while 
each side strove to manufacture enough munitions 
for a decisive victory. However, even a war of a 
few weeks or months would be enough. It would 
probably roll up at least as large a score of killed 
and maimed soldiers, of property destruction, as the 
late war of unblessed memory. It would probably 
kill many more civilians. 

What of the defence — less importantly against 
air-bombs loaded with tons of explosive, more im- 
portantly against poison gas? Now, you must de- 
fend not only armies but citizens of towns, not only 
soldiers but the weakest girl baby. Usually, when a 
new weapon is introduced into warfare, some time 
passes before men invent an adequate defence. The 
knife, carried in the hand or mounted on a shaft, 
dates from prehistoric times; we were well ad- 
vanced into historic times before body armor became 
good enough to turn the edge of a knife. The best 
defence against gun-fire — burrowing in the earth — 
though long known, was not fully worked out and 
universally applied until the late war. The mask 







4-> O <U G, 



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TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 59 

formed a pretty good defence against the first poison 
gases; its difficulties and imperfections I have men- 
tioned before. But the German mustard gas, the 
American Lewisite gas, attacks the skin, the one 
producing bad burns, the other fatally poisoning the 
system. To protect the individual against such at- 
tack there are envisaged at present two methods. 
The skin of the whole body may be greased with an 
ointment containing an antidote for the poison. The 
British were preparing, when the Armistice came, 
to adopt this defence for their armies against Ger- 
man mustard gas. But this was recognized as an 
imperfect defence. After your greased troops have 
for a few hours wallowed in the trenches or en- 
dured a rainstorm on the march, the ointment is 
rubbed off or washed off in patches. Better, if it 
could be done, would be a protective, chemically- 
treated suit with gloves and headpiece, perfectly 
fitting to the mask — in other words, a mask extended 
to cover the whole body. This may be tried, for 
armies. After all, they must have uniforms. Finally 
comes the method of sending the advanced forces to 
action enclosed in gas-proof tanks. 

But when you consider these methods of defence 
for civilian populations, you encounter special diffi- 
culties. In the next European war, shall we have all 
the inhabitants of Paris living in a coating of pro- 
tective ointment, the mask ready to hand? Every 
line officer knows how hard it was to make disci- 
plined soldiers keep on their masks in time of danger. 



60 THE NEXT WAR 

To make civilians keep themselves greased, to make 
them assume their masks promptly and intelligently 
in the event of a general killing raid over London 
or Paris, we should have to render universal mili- 
tary training really universal, and begin it not in 
the schools but in the cradle. The same objection — 
with expense in addition — would apply to the pro- 
vision of "anti-gas" suits for all civilians in the great 
cities. 

The gas-proof tank, a military improvement now 
virtually accomplished, points the way to the per- 
fect defence. Colonel Fuller imagines "centres of 
defence" — fortresses, or something like them, ren- 
dered gas-tight, wherein you may keep your reserve 
forces, to which your tanks will return for repairs 
and replenishment of supplies. We can reconstruct 
our great cities so as to furnish for our civilians "cen- 
tres of defence." That was done imperfectly in the 
late war, when in constantly-raided towns such as 
Venice the authorities banked the deep cellars with 
sandbags, thus turning them into dug-outs like those 
used by the troops. However, cellars will never form 
a defence against sinking, lethal, cell-killing gas like 
Lewisite and its probable successors. The shelters 
must be large enough to accommodate the people of 
a whole city; they must be deep enough in the ground 
to resist the enormous explosive power of the great, 
new bombs; they must be gas-proofed, either by 
rendering them air-tight and furnishing oxygen to 
keep the inmates alive, or by providing ventilators 



TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 61 

which make the outer air pass through an antidote. 
They must be as easily accessible as a subway — even 
more accessible. This virtually involves rebuilding 
modern cities, if the inhabitants expect to survive 
a war. It is absurd, of course. 

Unless some General Staff in Europe is hugging a 
deep and sinister secret, we have not yet found the 
killing ray. That lies beyond the present frontiers 
of science; its discovery involves pioneer work. If 
it comes, it may change and intensify warfare in 
many ways which we cannot at present conceive. 
But warfare by disease-bearing bacilli is already pre- 
paring in the laboratories. Here, for example, is 
one method which I have heard suggested and which, 
I learn from men of science, seems quite possible: 
Find some rather rare disease, preferably one which 
flourishes in a far corner of the world, so that peo- 
ple of your own region have no natural immunity 
against it, just as the American Indians have no 
immunity against measles. Experiment until you 
find a good, practical serum which may be manu- 
factured on a wholesale scale. Cultivate the bacilli 
until they are strengthened to that malignant stage 
with which the recent influenza epidemic made us 
familiar — that can be done with some species of 
bacilli. Innoculate your own army; if necessary your 
own civilian population. Then by night-flying aero- 
planes, by spies, by infected insects, vermin or water, 
by any other means which ingenuity may suggest, 
scatter the germs among the enemy forces. In a 



62 THE NEXT WAR 

few days, you will 'have a sick enemy, easily con- 
quered. It takes time to discover a specific or a 
serum for a new disease. The mischief would be 
done long before the laboratories of the enemy could 
find a defence for this especially romantic and valor- 
ous form of battle. As germ warfare is at present 
conceived, it would be directed against armies alone. 
But any one who followed the late war knows what 
human chains bind the troops in the trenches to the 
general population. With almost every one min- 
istering in some capacity to the army, soldiers and 
civilians are inextricably mixed. Armies simply could 
not be quarantined. Among the possibilities of the 
next war is a general, blighting epidemic, like the 
Black Plagues of the Middle Ages — a sudden, mys- 
terious, undiscriminating rush of death from which 
a man can save himself only by fleeing his fellow 
man. 

Then — there are easily cultivated, easily spread, 
diseases of plants. What about a rust which will 
ruin your enemy's grain crop and starve him out? 
That method of warfare has been suggested and is 
now being investigated. 

So much for the direct effect of the next land war 
upon human life, and especially upon civilian life. 
Before I leave the subject, however, I must go into 
naval operations, of which I have hitherto omitted 
mention. The submarine, in the hands of the Ger- 



TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 63 

mans, proved its distinct value. Many naval men 
say that the Germans made the same mistake with 
their submarines that they did with their gases, 
and that the British did with their tanks. They did 
not realize the power in their hands. Had they be- 
gun the war with as many submarines as they manned 
in 19 17, had they stuck from first to last to their 
policy of sinking without warning, they might have 
starved out England and won. The submarine grew 
mightily in speed, in cruising radius, in offensive 
power. The German U-boats of 19 14 were as 
slow as a tub freighter; they could make only short 
dashes from their bases; they depended almost en- 
tirely on their torpedoes. Those of 191 8 were 
almost as fast on the surface as an old-fashioned 
battleship, they proved that they could cross and re- 
cross the Atlantic on their own supplies of fuel, they 
mounted long-range five- and six-inch guns. That 
much greater improvement is possible, all naval 
designers agree. Certain naval architects hold that 
virtually all warships of the future will be capable 
of diving and traveling concealed under water — 
the submersible dreadnought. I shall not go into 
the present controversy between the experts who 
would stick to the surface dreadnought and those 
who believe in scrapping fleets and designing only 
submersibles. I, the landman, will not presume to 
judge between nautical experts. But I notice that 
those who adhere to the theory of surface fleets 



64 THE NEXT WAR 

qualify their statements with — "for the present." 
They seem to believe that it will come to submarines 
or submersibles in the end. 

We all know from the expression of the late war 
how perfectly the ocean protects submarines. Ger- 
mans have told me since the Armistice that at no 
time did the Imperial Navy have more than fifty 
of these craft cruising at once; usually there were 
only about twenty-five. Against them, the Allies 
were using at least half of their naval resources; 
thousands of craft, from giant dreadnoughts to swift 
little chasers, mobilized to fight imperfectly less than 
fifty of these deep-sea assassins! You can attack 
them with other naval vessels only from the surface. 
That "submarine cannot fight submarine" is a naval 
axiom. In the next war, a few hundred submersibles 
of the new, swift, powerful type could almost un- 
doubtedly accomplish what Germany failed to ac- 
complish in 19 1 7 and 19 18 — establish an effective 
food-blockade of England or of any other region 
dependent upon overseas importation for its bread 
and meat. 

And whoever starts such a campaign will un- 
questionably heed the plea of "national necessity" 
as did Germany in 1917-1918: abrogate the old sea- 
law which compelled attackers to warn ships about 
to be sunk, and strike out of the darkness and the sea- 
depths. For the lid is off. 

So we may add to the possible death-cost in the 



TACTICS OF THE NEXT WAR 65 

next war not only malnutrition but actual starvation 
"by wholesale." 

Remember those Danish statistics. Ten million 
soldiers in arms died in the last war; and thirty 
million others "who might be living today" are not 
living. War on civilians was not yet a generally 
acknowledged fact; it was only a practical result. 
In the next war, it will be an acknowledged fact. The 
civilian population, I repeat once for all, will be an 
objective of military necessity — fair game. 

It would not be, could not be, if we fought only 
with the old, primitive weapons, saw with our own 
eyes the effect of our blows. During the invasion 
of Belgium, a friend of mine stood beside a German 
private playing with a little Belgian girl. "Our dis- 
cipline is perfect," said the officer. "You see that 
soldier. He likes that child. He has toward her 
humane sentiments. Yet if I ordered him to run 
his bayonet through her, he would obey without an 
instant's hesitation." Now personally, I doubt that. 
The man in question might have obeyed; I do not 
believe that the average German soldier would have 
obeyed — slightly brutalized though he was by "the 
system." There were German atrocities in Belgium 
— I can testify personally to that — but they did not 
happen in that way. Contrary to a rumor widely 
circulated and believed by many Americans as gos- 
pel, the Germans did not cut off children's hands. 



66 THE NEXT WAR 

But the new warfare takes advantage of the limits 
of human imagination. If you bayonet a child, you 
see the spurt of blood, the curling up of the little 
body, the look in the eyes. . . . But if you loose 
a bomb on a town, you see only that you have made 
a fair hit. Time and again I have dined with French 
boy-aviators, British boy-aviators, American boy- 
aviators, home from raids. They were gallant, gen- 
erous, kindly youths. And they were thinking and 
talking not of the effects of their bombs but only 
of "the hit." If now and then a spurt of vision shot 
into their minds, they closed their imagination — as 
one must do in war. 



CHAPTER VI 

WAR AND THE RACE 

So much for civilians. Now let us turn our imagi- 
nations again upon those ten million soldiers dead in 
the last war, and the unestimated millions in the next. 
Let us forget the obvious; let me forget it who have 
seen war — the gray-green streak down Douaumont 
Ravine where lay tens of thousands of German dead, 
the rib-bones sticking everywhere out of Vimy Ridge, 
the wave of moaning from the three thousand 
wounded and dying in the Casino Hospital at 
Boulogne. Let us remember that all men must die, 
and consider the thing cold-bloodedly from the 
standpoint of the particular race which draws the 
sword, and of the whole human species. We shall 
find, then, that the chief loss of the late war was 
not the hundreds of billions of dollars of property 
value destroyed, nor yet the thirty million civilians 
"who might be living today," but the ten million sol- 
diers. 

From the pacifist literature which preceded our 
entrance into the European War, three books stand 
out in memory. Jean Bloch, a Pole, maintained that 
war could not be; the horrors of modern warfare 

67 



68 THE NEXT WAR 

were so great that men would not long face them. 
Events discredited Bloch; we found unexpected res- 
ervoirs of valor in the human spirit. Every week, 
along the great line, bodies of men performed acts 
of sacrifice which made Thermopylae, the Alamo and 
the Charge of the Light Brigade seem poor and 
spiritless. Normal Angell, writing from the eco- 
nomic viewpoint, predicted not that war could not 
be, but that it would not pay; the victor would lose 
as well as the vanquished. Events so far have tended 
to vindicate Norman Angell's view; perhaps the 
next ten years may vindicate him entirely. The third 
work, less known than the others, came out of 
Armageddon unshaken. It is Dr. David Starr Jor- 
dan's "War and the Breed." 

Jordan is an evolutionist, and looks at all society 
from the viewpoint of the so-called Darwinian the- 
ory. The reader may belong to a sect or a scientific 
creed which rejects evolution. But he need not be a 
Darwinian to accept Jordan's argument. He need 
only believe — I assume every one does — that the 
characteristics of ancestors are transmitted to their 
offspring, that strong men and women breed strong 
descendants, that weak men and women breed weak 
descendants. And Jordan maintained that a gen- 
eral war, fought by conscript armies under modern 
conditions, would set back the quality of races for 
centuries — that it would be a gigantic accomplish- 
ment in reverse breeding. 

This is how it works : if you are a grower of live- 



WAR AND THE RACE 69 

stock, trying to produce the champion horse or cow, 
you select from your colts or calves the finest speci- 
mens, and breed them; the others you slaughter or 
sterilize. The average cow new-caught by the bar- 
barians from the wild herds of the European steppes 
probably gave only a gallon or so of milk a day. We 
have cows which give their dozen gallons of milk a 
day; and they have been evolved from the wild 
steppe-cow by nothing else than this long process of 
selective breeding. Now if it were an object to do 
so, breeders could take their herds of big, strong, 
twelve-gallon Holsteins and breed them back to the 
scrubby little one-gallon-cow. They need simply to 
reverse the process — make it impossible for the fine 
specimens to breed, and produce their calves, gen- 
eration after generation, from the scrubs. 

Modern war — conscription plus increased killing 
power — does exactly this with the males of the hu- 
man species. You introduce universal service. Every 
young man, usually at the age of twenty, is drafted 
into the standing army for a service of two or three 
years. Gathered in the barracks, these conscripts 
are examined. Those not fit for military service, 
on mental and physical tests, are thrown out — in 
other words, the deformed, the half-witted or under- 
brained, the narrow-chested, the abnormally weak- 
muscled, the tuberculous — the culls of the breed. 
These culls are free to go their way, to marry if 
they wish, to become fathers. The rest are generally 
forbidden to marry until they have performed their 



70 THE NEXT WAR 

term of "first line" military service. Scientifically 
these men are selected as the flower of the nation. 
The term of first-line service completed, the young 
man at the age of twenty-two or twenty-three goes 
into the first reserve. He must take part annually 
in certain manoeuvers; otherwise he is free to work 
and to marry. At the age of twenty-six, twenty- 
eight or thereabouts, he is passed on to the second 
reserve. At about thirty-five, he becomes a "terri- 
torial" and remains in that classification until he is 
about forty-five, when his military duty is supposed 
to be done. 

"Fighting age is athletic age," say British sol- 
diers. I do not have to tell Americans, a sporting 
people, that the best days of the average athlete, 
especially in sports like boxing or football which 
require intense effort and physical courage, come in 
the early twenties. Those first-line troops are the 
best troops. 

Moreover, they are under arms when war breaks; 
they do not have to be gathered together, redrilled 
and redisciplined. So they go first into battle; lead 
all the early attacks; form generally the advanced 
forces all through. The second line, almost equally 
valuable, almost as much used, consists of men in 
the first reserve; and so on, until we get down to 
the territorials, the men between their late thirties 
and their middle forties. Theoretically, these "old" 
men are not supposed to get into action at all ex- 
cept when the necessity grows desperate. They 



WAR AND THE RACE 71 

guard roads and bridges, dig reserve trenches, garri- 
son captured territory, perform the hundred and 
one varieties of labor which an army requires behind 
its line. 

When all the statistics of the war are compiled 
and classified, their graphic chart will look like a 
pyramid. They will show that the losses bore by 
far the heaviest on the ages between twenty and 
twenty-five ; they shaded off until in the ages between 
forty and forty-nine they became almost negligible. * 

Here is reverse breeding on a wholesale, intensive 
scale. The young, unmarried men go first to be 
killed; are most numerously killed through the whole 
war. They are the select stock of their generation ; 
and practically, not one has fathered a child. Their 
blood is wholly lost to the race. Next come the 
men in their middle twenties. Some of them have 
married since they left the first line, and some have 
not. It is doubtful if they average more than one 
child apiece when their turn comes to die. So it 
goes on, class by class; smaller losses and more chil- 
dren, until we come to the Territorials of forty-five. 
In that category, the losses of life are proportion- 
ately very small, and if we study vital statistics, we 
find that men of this age have had about all the 
children they are going to have. But all this time 

* Forty-five years was the usual limit of military service; 
though for a few months during 1918, the British stretched con- 
scription to fifty. But many French and German Territorials who 
entered the war aped forty-five, were kept in the army until the 
end; and were therefore forty-nine in the year of the armistice. 



72 THE NEXT WAR 

the culls of whatever age, the men exempted because 
they are below standard, are living out their lives 
and fathering children. 

In our own draft, we proceeded on the European 
plan, calling to arms the men between twenty-one and 
thirty, and generally exempting the married. That 
age was set largely to get the men of best fighting 
age — "athletic age." But we were moved by an- 
other consideration, which showed itself in the ex- 
emption of married men. We wished to minimize 
human grief and human hardship. If an unmarried 
boy of twenty is killed there are only his immediate 
blood-family to mourn him. A married man of 
thirty-five has in addition a wife and children. 
Moreover, if he goes to the war in the ranks, he must 
leave his wife and children virtually to shift for 
themselves. Great Britain recognized the same 
principles when, in her advance to universal con- 
scription, she took the young before the old, the 
unmarried before the married. 

Humane and beautiful as well as expedient, all 
this; yet from the racial point of view, unscientific 
even to immorality. Better, far better, would it be 
to begin at the other end of the scale, mobilizing for 
first-line troops the men between seventy and sixty, 
for the second-line those between sixty and fifty, 
for Territorials those between fifty and forty-five. 
With these old men the race, as such, has little con- 
cern. They have mostly fathered their children, 
done their duty to the strain. 



WAR AND THE RACE 73 

Nature does not care in the least what becomes of 
the plant after it has produced its seed and the new 
crop is growing. If, allowing war, we were con- 
ducting it scientifically for the best interests of the 
race, the slogan of conscription would be not "single 
men first" but "grandfathers first." Of course, this 
is ridiculous. But it seems to me that whenever we 
carry out any aspect of modern war to its logical 
conclusion, we arrive at the ridiculous. 

The older wars of modern times were not con- 
ducted by conscription, as we know it now. The 
rank and file, as far as we can read the records, con- 
sisted very largely of the dregs of the population 
who had been forced into the army by press gangs. 
There was a sprinkling, however, of young, vigorous 
youths who went to war for the adventure; there 
were organized bodies of soldiers of fortune who 
hired out as mercenaries, and who must needs be 
sound physically. Occasionally, too, we find a body 
of sturdy peasantry like the English yeomen 
who followed the lords of the land to war. There 
was, however, no selective conscription, no careful 
medical examination to reject the culls of the blood 
and send the best to slaughter, usually no rule of 
"single men first." Even at that, the breeding-stock 
killed in the old wars was probably superior to the 
average level of the race and species. Jordan be- 
lieves that he can trace a kind of rhythm in the his- 
tory of "dominant nations." The war-like race, 
continuously engaged in battle, reaches a point where 



74 THE NEXT WAR 

it begins to go decadent, to find its force sapped. 
Spain, lord of the world up to the seventeenth cen- 
tury, holding her power by means of the famous 
Spanish infantry, "the wall which repaired its own 
breaches," suddenly faded away until by the nine- 
teenth century she was the football of Europe. But 
the off-hand recruiting systems of those old days 
could not possibly hit the breed as hard as our mod- 
ern method of scientific conscription. Just as techni- 
cally-improved war has worked toward greater and 
greater property-destruction, so has it worked to- 
ward greater and greater race-destruction.* 

The thirty million civilians deprived of life by 
Armageddon probably struck about the average 
level of the breed. Those who died of starvation 
or exhaustion in the great treks before the ad- 
vancing hordes of the late war were below that 
average. These flights were primitive struggles for 
existence, wherein the weakest died first. Without 
quite the same certainty, we may say that those who 
died of malnutrition and the epidemics directly en- 
gendered by war were somewhat below average. 
That — to be perfectly cold-blooded — was a gain 
to the race. But the unborn — for the most part 
they never came into this world because their po- 

* Jordan's militaristic opponents asked once for facts to support 
his theory. This caused Dr. Vernon Kellogg to investigate the 
old French records. He found that in the generation following 
the Napoleonic wars, the standard of height and weight for French 
recruits had greatly to be lowered by the military authorities. 
More significantly, he found the percentage of men rejected for 
physical unfitness greatly increased. 



WAR AND THE RACE 75 

tential fathers were away in the trenches or dead. 
Those fathers were the flower of Europe, physi- 
cally and mentally; meantime, the weaklings, re- 
jected by the recruiting offices, remained at home, 
breeding their vitiated blood into the strain. That 
was a loss to the race. Probably these items just 
about balance one another, and we get in the civilian 
losses an average of the mental and physical 
strength of the European breed. 

In the ten million soldiers lies the dead loss. Take 
France, who suffered most heavily of all. She had 
nearly a million and three-quarters men killed in 
action, died of wounds and "missing in action." But 
that does not tell the whole story. Of her young 
soldiers between nineteen and thirty-one years of 
age, about sixty per cent died in the war. While 
statistics are not yet compiled on this special point, 
it is doubtful if this glorious young company left 
nearly so much as an average of one child apiece. 
In the absolute, Germany lost more heavily, in the 
relative less heavily; she counts two million killed 
or missing in action or dead of wounds. And if we 
should hand over the human race to a breeder, to 
improve by the same methods he uses to improve a 
breed of horses, these are precisely the million and 
a half or two millions whom he would have chosen 
from the men of France and Germany for his pur- 
pose. 

This reduction of the strength in the European 
breed through the selective conscription system, plus 



76 THE NEXT WAR 

war by machinery, is one of those situations which 
one can prophesy in advance with mathematical ac- 
curacy. The vital statistics of the young and adoles- 
cent in the years between 191 8 and 1938, compared 
with those between 1894 and 19 14, are going to 
prove the point in cold figures. 

So far, wars in general have struck at the strength 
of the male strain alone. However much the women 
have been massacred, there has been no scientific 
selection in the choice of victims. The strength of 
woman has been left to war-depleted nations to re- 
new their blood. But in the next war we shall 
probably do away with that archaic check on the 
purpose of the great god Mars. Women, as I have 
already shown, have proved their value for indirect 
military purposes, and so put themselves within the 
circle of destruction. Already, the general staffs of 
Europe are saying that the recruiting of women in 
the late war was irregular, hit-and-miss, wasteful. 
In a struggle between national resources as well as 
national armies, it would be far more efficient and 
economical to mobilize them all and select the war- 
workers by scientific methods, according to national 
convenience and necessity. All of which is true and 
logical. And if women are put under conscription 
for munitions work, for ambulance and truck driv- 
ing, for the thousand and one varieties of light labor 
which they can perform in the rear areas of an army 
zone, we must proceed by the same methods which 
we use in selective conscription of the male ele- 



WAR AND THE RACE 77 

ment. We shall, first of all, spare the mothers, the 
women who have already given their strain to the 
breed. They are needed in their homes for the 
vital business of rearing children. We shall take 
the young unmarried women, and choose from them 
by scientific test the strongest and most brilliant, re- 
jecting the weakest and most stupid. That process 
was begun in the late war. The best managed mu- 
nitions works gave no woman a job until medical and 
psychological tests proved that she had the body and 
brains for the work. Just as with the men, we shall 
send the culls back to civilian life, free to pour their 
inferior blood into the veins of the new generation. 
In the late war, a few thousands of these superior 
women, chosen from among the volunteers for muni- 
tions workers and for transport drivers in the army 
zone, died through air raids and long-distance artil- 
lery fire. These losses were not great enough to 
have much effect on the breed. But they pointed the 
way we are going. In the next war, with its over- 
whelming air raids, its gases blotting out life over 
square miles, its bacilli, possibly its rays, munitions 
works and the services of the rear will be special 
objects of attack. There, as at the front, we shall 
kill by wholesale not by retail, and we shall kill our 
selected female breeding stock. So to the anti-social 
effects of the next war we must add one never ac- 
complished before in human history: the sapping of 
the feminine strength in the human race, as war — 
even before that great reversal of selective breed- 



78 THE NEXT WAR 

ing which was Armageddon — seems usually to have 
sapped the masculine strength. 

The extreme militarist declares that the highest 
civic duty of man is the advancement of the power 
and glory of his race or nation; nothing else really 
counts. He is confounded out of his own mouth. In 
the long story of races, what doth it profit a nation 
if during two or three generations she rules a world- 
circling empire as Spain did in the seventeenth 
century, and then sinks back exhausted and impotent 
as Spain did in the nineteenth? Does that make 
for the power and glory of the race? Yet biologic 
law seems to ordain that the sharp sword of the war- 
like nation cuts both ways; and when we intensify 
nature with modern science, the matter gets beyond 
seeming. In the idea that by war he advances the 
power and the ultimate glory of his race, the mili- 
tarist is again mistaking appearances for reality. 



CHAPTER VII 

THE COST IN MONEY 

So far, we have discussed mostly the direct effects 
of war — the last and the next — on human life. The 
loss of that accumulated wealth of the world which 
is property touches human life indirectly in a thou- 
sand ways, and is therefore of more than secondary 
importance. And here, we run into bewildering 
perplexities. What in the arbitrary terms of money 
the late war cost the European peoples, we already 
know. We know also approximately what it cost in 
out-and-out destruction of houses, fields, factories, 
mines and railroads by bombardment and conflagra- 
tion. But the shrewdest economist cannot guess the 
final cost. It is not enough to compile the national 
debt, so great as to lie beyond the imagination of 
the average man. Those debts cannot all be paid; 
in some manner or other, many of them will be re- 
pudiated. The true economic loss, which cannot be 
repudiated, lies in the disturbance of that delicate 
machine of manufacture and trade by which modern 
industrial nations lived and worked before the great 
war. We see that loss every day in the absurd con- 
ditions of the third year after the Armistice. There 

79 



80 THE NEXT WAR 

are three factors to industrial production — labor, 
machinery and raw materials. In Germany are near- 
ly three million cotton operatives, as expert as any 
in the world. Standing ready to their hands is a full 
equipment of the most modern machinery. Half of 
the cotton operatives of Germany are living in idle- 
ness and semi-starvation for lack of raw material. 
We raise the raw material in the South of the 
United States — and our southern farmers are in 
financial difficulties this winter because they have no 
market for their cotton! 

It was agreed in the Versailles treaty that Ger- 
many should furnish to France the equivalent of the 
coal-production destroyed when the Lille and Valen- 
ciennes mines were flooded. Germany has nearly 
fulfilled at least that clause of the treaty. At this 
moment (January, 192 1) German coal in enormous 
quantities lies piled up on sidings of France, unused. 
France has the expert operatives; except in the dev- 
astated North, she has her intact machinery; she 
has a great job of building to do, and that involves 
steel, which is made with coal. But she cannot use 
that German coal just now, because a combination 
of adverse exchange, undermined credits and shaken 
confidence keeps her working men from their ma- 
chines. There is in Poland and Austria that same 
combination of strong men and good machines, 
ready to work for their daily bread. But the men 
are starving because they have no work by which 
to earn food; and at the same time our farmers and 



THE COST IN MONEY 81 

those of the Argentine are complaining that they 
have slack markets for their food-products. 

What shrewd observers expect of the next few 
years in Europe may be seen in the present policy of 
the British Labor Party. Rightly or wrongly, the 
party leaders believe that they can take over the 
power in England. But they say frankly that they 
do not intend to do it now, because the next four or 
five years will bring such economic consequences of 
the late war as to swamp and discredit the faction 
in power. They prefer to let the "old crowd" take 
the onus. Possibly, the heaviest costs of the late 
war are still to come. 

Nor can we reckon the economic losses of Arma- 
geddon without counting in the past — the thirty or 
forty years of intensive preparation which preceded 
the explosion of 19 14. During that period, when 
chancellories kept the peace by the old-fashioned 
system of checks and balances, Europe was tradi- 
tionally an armed camp. Economically, it was in a 
state of perpetual warfare. National wealth grew 
in this period, but national expenditure on armies 
and navies grew faster. In France, which for va- 
rious reasons we may study most easily, the military 
and naval budget increased from fifteen to twenty 
per cent during each decade; and the indirect appro- 
priations for the army, as for example in the item of 
strategic railways, even faster. Directly and indi- 
rectly, she was by 1905, ten years before the great 
war, spending between two hundred and ten and two 



82 THE NEXT WAR 

hundred and twenty-five million dollars annually on 
her army and navy. At the same time, she was 
paying about a hundred and fifty millions annually 
in interest on the debts of old wars — she was still 
financing the campaigns of the two Napoleons. Such 
figures mean nothing to the average mind; but here 
is a basis of comparison. France is strongly central- 
ized. Most of her popular education is financed not 
by the city or county as with us, but by the national 
government. And in the years when it was paying 
more than two hundred millions for the next war, 
a hundred and fifty millions for old wars, the na- 
tional government spent on education about forty-six 
millions. 

Now this was almost dead economic loss. In the 
ordinary processes of industry, part of the receipts 
at least are going to increase the world's wealth. 
Take for example the ultimate destiny of a dollar 
paid into the cotton manufacturing business. Most 
of it buys someone bread and meat and shelter and 
clothing. But just so many cents or mills of that 
dollar buy factories, machinery, swifter transporta- 
tion — something which will make more wealth and 
still more wealth. It is like a crop of which the 
greater part is eaten, the lesser part kept for seed. 
The money spent on armies and navies in no wise in- 
creases the world's real wealth, even when the shells 
merely lie and disintegrate in the magazines, the 
guns grow old-fashioned in the barracks. And when 



THE COST IN MONEY 83 

they are used, of course they are actively destroying 
wealth. 

The war came; and it was possible under the urge 
of national necessity to increase taxation. All did, 
some more, some less. England crowded on the 
taxes until the man of an average middle-class in- 
come was paying before the end some forty per cent 
of his income. Germany and France paid less 
heavily at the time. Each was calculating on vic- 
tory, and on making the loser pay. France won; 
and already she realizes that she cannot begin to 
reimburse herself, even though she milks from Ger- 
many her last mark. And Germany the loser — 
expression fails in the face of her predicament. 

But tax as they might, the nations had at once to 
begin drawing on their future, asking for unprece- 
dented loans both from their own people and from 
foreigners. Debts piled up beyond imagination. 

Let me set down a few figures. They will not 
mean much to the reader, I suppose, any more than 
they mean much to the writer; they are too over- 
whelmingly big. In actual money, paid out over the 
counter, virtually all taken from the world's accu- 
mulated wealth, the war cost one hundred and 
eighty-six billion dollars. If you add the indirect 
cost such as destruction of property, loss of produc- 
tion and the capitalized value of the human lives, 
the sum reaches three hundred and thirty-seven 
billion dollars. The national debts of Great Britain 



84 THE NEXT WAR 

rose from three and a half billions to thirty-nine 
billions; of France from six and a third billions to 
forty-six billions; of the United States from one 
billion to nearly twenty-five billions. 

By certain comparisons, we may arrive at an un- 
derstanding of these figures. Again I will take 
France as the best example at hand. Her total 
national wealth — farms, mines, factories, buildings, 
railroads, canals, everything she owns — was esti- 
mated in 1920 at ninety-two and a half billion dol- 
lars. Her debt, as I have said, is forty-six billion 
dollars — almost exactly half her total wealth. That 
wealth was her heritage. When the first Gaul, long 
before Julius Caesar came, cleared land on the bor- 
ders of the Seine, he was creating national wealth 
for the France of 1920. It had been accumulating 
for more than twenty centuries. Now we will say 
that you own a factory worth, at current market 
rates, something like one hundred thousand dollars. 
There comes a period of unprecedented hard times, 
in the midst of which you have a fire which — since 
you carry no insurance — destroys the value of a part 
of your plant. You find that your business is worth 
ninety-two thousand and five hundred dollars; and 
that you have been forced to put upon it a mortgage 
of forty-six thousand dollars. Then you face an- 
other period of hard times, with money tight, mar- 
kets poor, raw materials hard to get. That, in terms 
of business, is the situation of France. Great 
Britain is only a little less affected. Her national 



National Debts of 
United States, Great Britain 6) France 
in 1913 and in 1Q2Q 



1913 



19 20 



I 



1913 



1920 



1 

I 



1913 



1920 



UNITED STATES 



GREAT BRITAIN 



FRANCE 



THE COST IN MONEY 87 

wealth is one hundred and twenty billions; her debt 
is nearly forty billions. So it goes, in greater or less 
degree, with Germany, Italy, the Austrian states, 
the Balkan states. This apart from the actual 
physical destruction of property. 

There again we run into incomprehensible figures. 
I have spoken already of the growing disproportion 
between the cost of the cannon and its charge on 
the one hand and the destruction which it can accom- 
plish on the other. Of that, Northern France 
stands as the living proof. France lost the most 
heavily in property, as she did in life. Proportion- 
ately to her population and wealth, Belgium's loss 
is only a little less; among the greater nations, Italy 
stands next. Physical destruction of property was 
very unevenly distributed. But it all comes out of 
the wealth of the world; and so interlocked are the 
activities of modern nations that you cannot destroy 
any considerable body of wealth in one region with- 
out causing disturbances in others. 

Let us abandon abstract figures and make this 
the basis of comparison: In 1906, the city of San 
Francisco was partially destroyed by earthquake and 
fire. A year or so later, we had a brief financial 
depression; there were lesser depressions in England 
and Germany, where insurance companies had been 
hard hit. And many economists said that it was all 
due to the loss of wealth and the disturbance of con- 
ditions caused by the San Francisco disaster. 

In Northern France, about as many buildings 



88 THE NEXT WAR 

were destroyed — omitting those merely damaged — 
as there are in Greater New York; and New York 
has twelve or thirteen times the population of San 
Francisco at the time of the disaster. The region 
of San Francisco lost no canals, railroads, or im- 
proved highways. She was not a manufacturing 
city; and such factories as she had mostly escaped. 
But France did lose factories, canals, railways, high- 
ways in her most thickly populated country — a belt 
four hundred miles long, from five miles wide in 
Alsace to fifty miles wide north and west of Noyon. 
In the region merely invaded, about Lille, she lost 
enormous values in machines turned into scrap-iron, 
and eventually into shells, by the conquerers. The 
disaster of 1906 destroyed no agricultural land. 
France lost to agriculture, for at least a generation, 
from four to five hundred thousand acres — land 
with its top-soil blown to the winds, or ground into 
the clay subsoil. Roughly, I estimate that the de- 
struction of visible, physical property in Northern 
France — to say nothing of Belgium, Italy, Serbia, 
Greece and East Prussia — was equivalent to twenty 
or twenty-five San Francisco disasters. Leaving out 
the direct property loss of other nations, the orgy 
of spending during four and a quarter years, the 
incredible national debts and their interest, this belt 
of destruction in France alone would almost account 
for the present disturbances of conditions in the 
whole world. 

The war-bill of nations in peace times consists of 



Cosb of World Wax 

compared with 

Cosb of All Wars 

from 1793 (be£iimin£ of Napoleonic Wars) 

to 1910 




THE COST IN MONEY 91 

interest on the national debt, caused by old wars, 
plus the direct cost of supporting armament. Still 
using France as an example; if she spends as much 
on her army and navy in the period between 1920 
and 1930 even as she did in the period between 1900 
and 1 9 10, her war-bill will be multiplied by about 
three and a half. She may get a certain amount of 
German indemnity. That, probably, will not be 
enough to restore her North and to finance her pen- 
sions; it will not go toward lightening the taxes 
which pay the war-bill. France, like the other Eu- 
ropean nations, was taxed in 19 14 to the point of 
absurdity; now, she must eventually multiply the 
taxes by three or four. Even this calculation does 
not involve a sinking-fund to pay off the debt. Fifty 
years from now, possibly a hundred years, France 
will still be paying the bill of 19 14-18. And this is 
true not only of France, but of all the other nations 
who fought through the great war. In hardship, 
toil, reduced standard of living, the next two gener- 
ations will pay — or else — this is still possible — 
European civilization will tumble into the gulf of 
anarchy. H. G. Wells said to the writer, a month 
after the war began, "All our lives we shall be 
talking of the good, old days of 19 13." That war- 
prophecy is being fulfilled. 

Let us now bring the subject home. We, of all, 
lost the least in property as in men. We had, in- 
deed, profited greatly in the two years and a half 
of our neutrality. We held, by the end of that 



92 THE NEXT WAR 

period, almost half of the gold in the world. Of 
course, we poured all that prosperity and much more 
into the last two years of the world war. We multi- 
plied our national debt by twenty-four. We are 
beginning for the first time to know what taxation 
really means. We grumble at the heavy income tax; 
yet if we are to meet our obligations, it must con- 
tinue at something like its present scale for the life- 
time of this generation. Fifty years from now, we 
may still be paying. We experienced during the two 
years following November, 191 8, an era of hectic 
prosperity — followed by a collapse, in which we are 
learning that war-gold is fool's gold. All things 
considered, we came as near as anyone to winning 
Armageddon. But everyone loses a modern war, 
the victors along with the vanquished; economically, 
we too lost. 

Before we entered the great war, we were called 
a pacifist people and as such were the scorn of 
European militarists. Indeed, war had troubled us 
less than any other great people. Since our federa- 
tion, we had fought only one first-class war, that 
between the states in 1861-65. The war of 1812, 
the Mexican War, the Spanish War were, socially 
and economically speaking, comparable only to the 
small colonial expeditions of Great Britain and 
France. Beginning with the eighties and nineties of 
the past century, we had built up a comparatively 
strong navy; by 19 14, it ranked third or perhaps 
fourth among those of the great powers. However, 



Cosb of the World War 
during its last year 




The money the World M&r cost for a single Hour 
during the last year would, huild ten high schools 
costing one million dollars each. 

The money it cost for a single doxy would build in 
each oF the 48 states two hospitals costing $500,000 
each; two $ 1,000,000 high schools in each state; 
300 recreation centers with gymnasiums arid swim- 
ming pools costing' *30Q00O each; and there would 
be left *6,000,000 to promote industrial education. 

$ 240,OO0,00O was the total cost per day for all 
countries. It includes only direct costs, not" 
the destruction of civil property. 




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THE COST IN MONEY 95 

our standing army was to European militarists a 
joke. At one period between the Spanish War and 
the Great War we had only twenty-five thousand 
regulars under arms, whereas in several European 
countries of smaller population than ours the stand- 
ing army consisted of more than three quarters of a 
million soldiers; and every able-bodied man had 
been trained and equipped. 

Yet in the year 1920, with the war over and done, 
with our great army demobilized and our fleets back 
to the business of manoeuvres and visiting, we were 
spending the greater part of our national revenues 
on wars, old and new. In 1920, the proportion was 
ninety-three per cent. 

What could our government do with this money? 
What could it not do! 

A little before the Great War, I was talking to 
an expert, nationally famous, on good roads. He 
spoke of the highways so vitally important in our 
great and wide-spreading country and of the stag- 
gering costs of road improvement. "We could of 
course pave every country road in the United 
States," he said, "and the economies it would intro- 
duce into transportation would make it a paying 
proposition in the end. But the initial cost and the 
upkeep — you can't possibly raise enough money. 
It would take, I estimate, seventy-five per cent of 
our Federal revenues." There you are. This "im- 
possible" but paying proposition would take seventy- 
five per cent of our revenues; war in 1920 took 



96 THE NEXT WAR 

ninety-three per cent. We could make all the com- 
mon roads of the United States like the famous 
main highways of France or Belgium, for the cost 
of our wars, past, present and future — and still 
have money in the bank. 

In our government are a number of bureaus con- 
cerned with increasing production, fighting disease, 
supervising, as it seems that only governments can 
supervise, the agencies which conserve life and in- 
crease production. Our entomologists have reduced 
such plant scourges as the San Jose scale and grape 
phylloxera almost to impotence, so saving us many 
millions yearly; they are on their way to conquer the 
boll weevil in cotton. Our ichthyologists have plans, 
now only partly realizable from lack of money, 
greatly to increase our fish supply. Our boards of 
health, under national supervision, have virtually 
killed yellow fever and smallpox, greatly reduced 
malaria and typhoid fever, are beginning to attack 
those "social diseases" which are next to war the 
great scourge of the human race. 

Go into any of these Washington bureaus and 
some specialist, some practical dreamer struggling 
along at a salary running from fifteen hundred dol- 
lars to three thousand dollars a year, will tell you 
what "his people" could do to multiply production 
and improve human conditions, to lengthen and 
fortify life, to increase the beauty or usefulness of 
the world "if we only had the money." But they 
haven't the money. For these activities, the Gov- 



Actual expenditures of the United 
States for the fiscal year 1Q19 "20 
(Loans to European Governments 
not included) 



*<s 



/ 



sf 



J> 



4? 



/ 



& 



.<? 



/ 



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D D 



226 MILLIONS 



85 MILLION6 






50 MILLIONS 



PENSIONS, INTEREST 
AND OTHER EXPEN- 
SES ARISING FROM 
FfcST WARS 



2,890 MILLIONS 



ARMY & NAVY 
(PREPARATIONS 
FOR FUTURE 
WARS) 



1,348 MILLIONS 



THE COST IN MONEY 99 

ernment grants less than one per cent of the Na- 
tional revenue. In 1920, the existing army and 
navy absorbed thirty-eight per cent; and the whole 
war bill, as I have said, was ninety-three per cent. 

What could we, "the pacifist nation of the world," 
not do with that ninety-three per cent? You re- 
member the Roosevelt Dam in the Far West — 
hundreds of thousands of acres transformed from 
desert to fertile farms with a little government 
money. Millions more are awaiting the same trans- 
formation. Here is a chance to increase our true 
national greatness; but the government, of course, 
cannot undertake that because it cannot spare the 
money. Our forests are shrinking; we feel the ef- 
fect in the rising price of lumber, the shortage of 
wood-pulp. We need to reforest on a large scale; 
that work, European countries have learned, can be 
most cheaply, easily and intelligently done by a cen- 
tral government. We are reforesting, if at all, 
on a microscopic scale ; we are barely keeping down 
fires. All because we cannot afford the money from 
our national revenues. Wars, past, present and 
future, cost too much. 

Then comes the period when our long prepara- 
tion for new wars becomes— 'action. Then arrive* 
an orgy of spending without return — and a greater 
war-bill for the future. 

But we are treating of "the next war." By that 
we mean of course not a little "settling" war such 
as the present British and French campaigns in the 



ioo THE NEXT WAR 

Near East, the skirmishes along the Russian border, 
nor yet the minor colonial expeditions. We mean a 
struggle between industrial nations, thoroughly pre- 
pared. In terms of economics, will that struggle 
be less costly than the last, or more? 



Cost of Wars bo the United Stages 



REVOLU- 
TIONARY 
WAR 



WAR 

OF 

1812 



MEXICAN 
WAR 



I 



SPANISH- 
AMERICAN 
WAR 



WORLD 
WAR 



"National debt at end of w\r. 



CHAPTER VIII 

ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR 

In all the major wars of the past three centur- 
ies, one traces a certain progression from armed 
contest between individual nations to armed contest 
between alliances. Sometimes indeed, two hostile 
nations are "isolated," as when the rest of Europe 
managed to keep out of the war between France 
and Germany in 1870. But the tendency remains. 
And there is a reasonable cause for this — the in- 
creasing speed and facility of transportation, the 
increasing interdependence of nations. In 19 14, 
according to an authority on transportation, any 
man was in terms of time eleven times nearer to any 
given point in the world than in 18 14. There you 
have one explanation for the world-wide spread of 
the Great War. 

If things in this "new world" are to go in the old 
manner, the chancellories of Europe will seek to 
keep an impermanent peace, will give themselves a 
"breathing-space between wars" by forming al- 
liances. With the major nations struggling even for 
greater advantage, with the smaller nations in grow- 
ing fear of their own defencelessness, the alliances 

103 



104 THE NEXT WAR 

will naturally tend to grow greater and greater. "In 
the next war there will be no neutrals," some say; 
almost certainly, in the next European war. Spain, 
Switzerland, Holland, Scandinavia, Greece, will be 
afraid, remembering Belgium, to remain out of al- 
liances. Indeed, Belgium has pointed the way. A 
recognized neutral up to the Great War, she has re- 
nounced the principle of neutrality, and allied her- 
self with France. Probably the great European 
powers will draw in the Orient actively — Japan's 
part, China's part in the late war were merely 
passive. For the world-machine tends to become 
ever more complex, and nations ever more interde- 
pendent. The swift airship is here; if a man is 
eleven times nearer any given point than he was in 
1 8 14, soon he will be twenty times nearer. 

Can we stay out of the next general war? We 
could not stay out of the last. We are passing from 
a stage where we depended for foreign trade mainly 
on raw materials, whose sale does not need to be 
"pushed," to the industrial stage. Increasingly, our 
exports will consist of manufactured goods. For- 
eign markets will be to us not dumping-grounds for 
short seasons of overproduction but real factors in 
our national prosperity. And foreign markets for 
manufactured goods need cultivation, even forcing. 
With our unrivalled wealth, we shall store up sur- 
plus capital, which will find more attractive returns 
in undeveloped regions at home. That is happening 
already. Since the war, hundreds of millions, per- 



ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR 105 

haps billions, of American dollars have been invested 
in new, promising commercial fields abroad. So, 
if we play the game as we find it, we shall enter the 
circle of "financial imperialism" and find ourselves 
in some way much more closely affected by the next 
war than we were by the last, and correspondingly 
under a greater urge to enter it as belligerents. 

The spread of the next war may conceivably be 
limited by diplomacy as was the war of 1870; even 
so, the next one after that probably cannot be lim- 
ited; and all our "proud isolation," our tradition 
against entangling alliances, will not keep us out. 

The Great War, considered in terms of econom- 
ics, began not in 19 14 but in 1871, when the French 
and Germans signed the Treaty of Frankfort — 
when the European nations began to increase their 
standing armaments. In the same sense, the next 
war began when, after the Armistice of 191 8, the 
great powers kept up their armies, started experi- 
ments with more efficient but more expensive ways 
of killing. It will be war by machinery from now 
on, not war by hand. And machine-work requires 
a much greater initial outlay of capital than hand- 
work. Naval warfare has always been war by ma- 
chinery. It will not be necessary for me to prove 
by figures the greater cost of a navy, in proportion 
to the number of men employed, than of an army. 
That is going to be changed. The tank and the 
aeroplane have come — air-machines and land-ma- 
chines, equivalent to the destroyer, the submarine 



106 THE NEXT WAR 

and the battleship, which are sea-machines. Of 
course, a big tank can whip a little tank just as a big 
man can whip a little man. There is no more prac- 
tical limit to the size of tanks than to that of naval 
vessels. The same rule probably holds true of 
aeroplanes. Consequently, as soon as the European 
powers begin to wriggle out of their present fix, 
we may expect them, with what margin they have, 
to begin a race of armament more expensive in pro- 
portion to their resources than the race of 1871- 
19 14. The tank of today may be compared to a 
caravel. We shall have the destroyer-tank; then 
some nation will come along with the cruiser-tank, 
and the others must follow or underwrite defeat. 
And so on, up to the dreadnought tank — a gas- 
proofed fortress on caterpillar wheels, perhaps as 
complex and expensive as the sea-dreadnought. And 
if one alliance increases her fleet of land-dread- 
noughts from a hundred to a hundred and twenty, 
from a thousand to twelve hundred, the rival al- 
liance must let out another notch and follow. You 
may, if you wish, translate all this into terms of 
aircraft, and the economic result will be the same. 
In the last war, nations learned that they must 
bend every resource, and especially every industrial 
resource, to victory. But some of them learned it 
rather late. Even Germany was for a long time 
manufacturing and exporting to the adjacent neutral 
countries such commodities as machinery. Later, in 
the fierce stress of the war, Germany turned all her 



ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR 107 

machine-factories into munitions factories. Eng- 
land went on for nearly two years with a business- 
as-usual policy before she learned she had better 
make munitions her sole business. There can be no 
such dalliance in the next war. "It will not be de- 
clared; it will burst." Upon the promptness and 
speed of the initial thrust may depend victory — then 
or later. Not only must the magazines be always 
full, the tanks and aeroplanes always in complete 
commission, the gas retorts always charged; but you 
must have your factories always ready for an imme- 
diate change. You must be prepared at the shortest 
notice to turn your dye-and-chemical works into 
poison gas works, your sewing-machines and type- 
writer factories into factories for shell-parts — and 
so on through a thousand industries. This requires 
an industrial readjustment obviously expensive, still 
more subtly expensive. 

When the war comes, you start war-work not 
desultorily as in 19 14, but full speed from the mark 
— not at a five per cent scale gradually increasing, 
as in 1 9 14, but as near as possible to a one hundred 
per cent scale. Your whole population has been 
mobilized, perhaps partly trained, in advance. Your 
young woman knows her place in the factory and 
reports at once to the foreman, just as your young 
man knows his place in the ranks and reports at 
once to the sergeant. The process of turning the 
whole national energy from wealth to waste begins 
at once, full power. The next war may be shorter 



108 THE NEXT WAR 

than the last; it can scarcely, at this intensive pace, 
be less costly. 

Concerning the actual destruction of physical 
property, one may speak with less certainty. It all 
depends upon the larger strategy. I have suggested 
the elimination of all life in such a city as Paris — or 
New York — as a possible result. That could be ac- 
complished by such a gas as Lewisite. Now Lewisite 
whirled in a lethal cloud over Paris would not 
greatly injure property. When at length the poison 
was dissipated, the Opera would still be there and 
the Louvre and the great railway terminals and 
the factories — a little corroded perhaps, but still 
usable after you cleaned out the corpses and tidied 
up a bit. So perhaps a better way of breaking up 
the "resistance of the rear" would be to exterminate 
not the human Paris but the physical Paris. That 
could be done in one gigantic conflagration started 
by inextinguishable chemicals dropped from a few 
aircraft. The method is practicable even now, in 
the infancy of chemical warfare; and the military 
chemists of Europe are experimenting further along 
these lines. Such a campaign would of course not 
be confined to Paris; although Paris as a centre for 
the brains of war, as the most vital knot in the rail- 
way web and as a great factory city, is eminently 
important. It would be aimed also at Lyons and 
St. Etienne, great manufacturing cities, at Mar- 
seilles, Cherbourg, Havre and Bordeaux, the great 



ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR 109 

ports, at a hundred little cities which do their part 
in making munitions. 

In such a campaign of conflagrations, the loss of 
life would necessarily be less than in a killing attack 
with gas. But possibly not much. Imagine Paris 
suddenly become a superheated furnace in a hundred 
spots; imagine a swift rush of flame through every 
quarter; imagine the population struggling, piling 
up, shriveling with the heat; imagine the survivors 
ranging the open fields in the condition of starving 
animals. 

Such a campaign could in a few weeks nearly 
equal the property-losses of the Great War; espe- 
cially if the defenders, whom I have imagined to be 
the French, retaliated on the attackers — say the 
Germans — and burned Berlin and the Rhine towns. 

So far as we can see now, gas will probably be 
the standard weapon of the next war. High ex- 
plosive will still be used on an extensive scale; but 
it will be auxiliary to the new killing instrument. 
It is unlikely that there will be a locked trench-line 
and a steady bombardment lasting for years. Con- 
sequently — ignoring the possibility of great confla- 
grations — we may hope for a smaller loss in the 
item of buildings. On the other hand, the bill will 
probably show a larger item for destroyed fields — 
agricultural wealth. The struggle just finished was 
the first in history where any considerable area of 
land was ruined for cultivation. Now it is a prop- 



no THE NEXT WAR 

erty of the new poison gas that it sterilizes — not 
only kills cells but prevents the growth of cells. 
Concerning one successor of Lewisite gas an expert 
has said: "You burst a container carrying a minute 
quantity of the substance which makes the gas, at 
the foot of a tree. You do not see the fumes rise; 
it is invisible. But within a few seconds you see 
the leaves begin to shrivel. While we are not quite 
certain, we estimate that land on which this gas has 
fallen will grow nothing for about seven years." In 
the next war, — unless we discover meantime some 
still more effective method of killing — clouds of such 
gas will sweep over hundreds of square miles, not 
only eliminating all unprotected life, animal and 
vegetable, but sterilizing the soil — "for about 
seven years." What were farms, orchards and gar- 
dens will become in a breath deserts. The power 
of its soil to produce food is the first, vital item in 
the wealth of nations. It would seem that this in- 
creased loss of productive land should at least 
balance the decreased loss in buildings. 

So modern warfare, in its economic aspect, fol- 
lows the same rule as in its human aspect. Now 
that we have renounced all pretty rules of chivalry, 
now that we have put brains into the business, its 
destructiveness ever increases. There, perhaps, lies 
the best chance of eliminating it from the world. 
The desire to create and to conserve wealth is deeply 
implanted in the bosom of man. Why not? The 
two primary forces by which a species lives are the 




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ECONOMICS AND THE NEXT WAR m 

desire for food and the desire to reproduce. This 
desire springs from the primary desire for food. 
Someone has pointed out that the temperance re- 
formers of the United States made little progress 
so long as they harped on the sin of drunkenness. 
Only when they touched the question on its economic 
side, showed that alcohol was a great enemy to 
wealth and production, did the prohibition move- 
ment go with a rush. In some fifty years of agita- 
tion, pacifists have dwelt on the cruelties and horrors 
of war — always the moral and sentimental side. 
Now we are learning that it does not pay. The vic- 
tor may, relatively, lose less than the vanquished. 
But victor and vanquished both lose in the absolute. 
That may be the clinching argument. 



CHAPTER IX 



"the tonic of nations" 



The moral value in peace, war and military 
preparation can of course be treated with less cer- 
tainty than the racial and economic values. You 
cannot measure virtue with a yardstick nor establish 
by statistics the comparative virtue and vice, honor 
and dishonor, truth and falsehood in any man or 
any race. Here one must rely on general observa- 
tion. 

Up to the great struggle in 19 14-18, the mili- 
tarist and the aggressive patriot had somewhat the 
better of the moral argument. Obviously the man 
who offered up his life for the welfare or glory or 
whatsoever of his clan, tribe or nation is doing a 
fine, high thing. "Greater love than this hath no 
man." But modern war is changing even that. Of 
the ten million killed in battle, the forty million 
under arms, comparatively few made the supreme 
sacrifice voluntarily. They were conscripts. They 
had to go and take the chance of being killed — or 
die with certainty against a wall. Most of these 
men had received their one, two or three years of 
military training. It had involved mental training, 

113 



"THE TONIC OF NATIONS" 113 

designed to lash them up, when the moment of ac- 
tion came, to a love of war and a desire for victory. 
That, and the new experience, seemed to keep them 
in a state of blithe morale for the first few months. 
There is a curious, exalted state of mind about the 
early days of a war. All of us who dodged about 
the rear, immune from its hardships, nearly immune 
from its dangers, felt that mood. Never again 
shall I be so poignantly moved by the beauty of 
paintings, of old cathedrals, of women, of blossom- 
ing fields, as during those early days of the war. It 
was as though I were constantly and pleasantly a 
little drunk. Now the men at the front — wallow- 
ing in filth and misery, hardening themselves against 
instant death — felt nevertheless something of the 
same mood. Then it passed, as intoxication will. 
Thereafter, they "carried on" because they must. 
They had been taught it was their duty; most of 
them believed that; but deep down lay a rebellion 
against the whole principle of the, thing. Boards 
of morale and of propaganda invented the phrase 
"the war to end war." The men of the trenches 
clutched at that. "It must never happen again" — 
you hear the phrase to weariness from the British 
ranks, the French ranks, the Belgian ranks, the 
Italian ranks. They did not consider themselves as 
men making an act of sacrifice but rather as men 
caught in a wheel from which there was no present 
escape. Germany went to war in a state of exalta- 
tion, lashed up through forty years of military prepa- 



114 THE NEXT WAR 

ration. But the German ranks must have felt the 
same; else there would have been no German revo- 
lution. Read Philip Gibbs's "Now It Can Be Told" 
and Henri Barbousse's "Under Fire" — tolerant ob- 
servers of high intelligence and of wide experience 
these two — and learn how little exaltation of self- 
sacrifice there was in Armageddon. 

Much propaganda was spilled during the war to 
show how, in the same manner, Armageddon prof- 
ited the higher morals of the civilian population. 
We heard of the "flapper" who became a heroine; 
of the frivolous matron who put off her silks and 
chiffons, put on denim and went to work "in muni- 
tions"; of the selfish rich man who gave up servants 
and automobiles and shooting lodges to help finance 
the war. This was indeed a moral gain — a tem- 
porary one at least. It is good for the souls of the 
overfed that they fast; it is good for the souls of 
the idle that they go to work; it is good for the souls 
of the selfish that they feel the thrill of a generous, 
common emotion. But how large was this special 
moral gain? Only as large as the upper class. 
Every country has its submerged tenth and corre- 
spondingly its exalted tenth. The other eight-tenths 
do not sacrifice comfort or nourishment or leisure — 
at least not voluntarily. They have no margins of 
the kind to sacrifice. When the accidents of war 
drove a family ahead of an invading army to perish 
of hunger or hardship in the fields, when a whole 
population lived on reduced rations because of a 



'THE TONIC OF NATIONS" nj 

blockade — that was not a voluntary sacrifice. To 
take seriously the argument that such a war as we 
have just endured is good because people "know the 
nobility of self-sacrifice" is to imply that the upper 
class is the only class which counts. 

Unquestionably, there came with the war a move- 
ment back to whatever religion the peoples of 
Armageddon have. But I could never feel, observ- 
ing Europe during the war, that this was the highest 
and healthiest form of religion. With their sons in 
peril of death, their homes in peril of destruction, 
their nations in peril of extinction, people turned 
toward whatever God they had — to ask for some- 
thing. Nor — again I speak from observation — did 
this special form of religion seem to survive the war. 

And there was a strong back-current which cen- 
sorships, both official and implied, prevented us 
from describing while the war was on. Whole 
classes of the European population threw off the 
ordinary moral restraints imposed by peace. The 
performances of a certain large and wealthy group 
were notorious; and once I spoke frankly on this 
matter to a woman of the class in question. "Oh, 
it's eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die," 
she said. "Our people are doing the things they've 
always wanted to do. Their inhibitions are off. 
They feel that nothing matters any more." 

At best, whatever moral force was loosed by the 
Great War seems to me an impermanent thing. It 
did not survive the Armistice. It became no part of 



n6 THE NEXT WAR 

the moral heritage of mankind. Lord Roberts de- 
scribed war as "the tonic of races." He confused 
substance with shadow, I think. It is a stimulant, not 
a tonic. Most of us know the difference. Iron is 
a tonic; alcohol a stimulant. Iron strengthens the 
system; alcohol seems to give temporary strength. 
Iron is a permanent gain; the reaction makes alco- 
hol a permanent loss. It is related that the Oriental 
alchemist who first discovered alcohol thought he 
had the elixir of life — and drank himself to death. 
The militarist mind, still primitive in its workings, 
still believing that things are so because they seem 
to be so, makes the same mistake. Regarded in the 
most favorable light, the state of war is a stimulant, 
not a tonic. 

At the beginning of the late war, we heard from 
German, French, British and American militarists 
that nations grew soft through peace. China 
they set up as the awful example — notwithstanding 
the fact that war is the only practical activity for 
which China of the past two hundred years has 
shown any aptitude. Her Tai-Ping rebellion spilled 
more blood than any other military struggle of the 
nineteenth century. But do nations grow soft 
through peace? The late war seemed to prove quite 
the contrary. 

During the forty-four years between 1870-19 14, 
the Western nations of the European continent, 
while armed for war, had preserved peace by the 
concert of the powers. There were small colonial 



"THE TONIC OF NATIONS" 117 

expeditions, it is true; but those involved compara- 
tively few men, only a little strain on the national 
resources. Britain's expedition against the Boers 
was only a second-rate war. Europe never knew a 
period of peace so long and so profound. When the 
Germans marched on France, not one in ten thou- 
sand French or German soldiers had ever expe- 
rienced the buzz of a bullet past his ear. From 
these people grown soft through peace we might 
have expected cowardice, timidity — whole armies 
breaking at the first fire. We got unexampled hero- 
ism. It was written in the old books on infantry 
tactics when a body of troops lost ten per cent or at 
most fifteen, they became an uncertain quantity — 
even though you had been able to replace the losses, 
it was time to take them out if you could. In the 
Battle of the Somme, the Allied Armies regularly 
kept divisions in the line until the replacements 
numbered fifty per cent — sometimes more. Whole 
companies, whole regiments fought so often to the 
traditional "last handful" that the newspapers 
scarcely troubled to record such performances — 
they had grown too common. Study, if you want 
concrete proof, the record of the famous French 
Twentieth Corps, recruited from Paris — city men, 
and therefore most affected by the soft influence of 
peace. 

Militarists have answered that universal military 
training accounts for this unexpected hardness. 
Frenchmen, Germans and Italians had been edu- 



n8 THE NEXT WAR 

cated for war, taught to think from their infancy 
in terms of war; and we are dealing with a state of 
mind. Then what about the British? The Island of 
Britain had protected herself by navies, not armies. 
Her small army was composed of volunteers. The 
average Englishman, Scotchman, Irishman or 
Welshman did not know the trigger of a rifle from 
the muzzle. He had never thought of war as a pos- 
sibility of his life. When Britain took to the draft, 
she gathered in the last of these young men, ran 
them through four or five months of intensive train- 
ing, sent them to the line. Generally such troops, 
as one might expect, were inferior to the veterans 
in military technique. They were little if any in- 
ferior in "hardness." I saw a British draft-division 
once literally staggering back to the rest-station. It 
was a time of special stress, when relief divisions 
were hard to find. These men had been kept in the 
line until nearly seventy per cent of their original 
strength was gone and replaced. Yet they had held 
firm to the end. I have shown how modern war- 
fare under the conscription system chooses the best, 
takes their activity from the existing generation, 
their strong blood from the next generation. That 
is your true softening process. Nations do not grow 
hard through wars and preparation for wars. This 
is another thing which is not so, but only seems so. 
Armageddon affords proof that the reverse is true. 



CHAPTER X 

THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 

All this leads up to the question of the moral 
factor in general military preparation — whether 
peace-time conscription or universal military train- 
ing. Is it useful only as a means of national defence, 
or has it a real value for the general purposes of 
society? The militarists say that it has. To begin 
with, it inculcates obedience, and the instinct of 
discipline. It spreads the habits of civilization 
among the masses. It takes boys with round shoul- 
ders, shuffling gait, uncleanly ways, lawless manners, 
and makes them straight, upstanding, clean, orderly, 
obedient men. During the war, they showed us 
photographs of these awful examples, before and 
after taking. 

Now it is true that tens of thousands of our 
young men, perhaps hundreds of thousands, were so 
transformed by army training. But we must con- 
sider averages, not exceptions. Millions of others 
— certainly the great majority — came from a good, 
sound American environment. All of them in their 
childhood, most of them in their youth, had prac- 
tised athletic sport in some form. They presented 

119 



120 THE NEXT WAR 

themselves to the drill-sergeant with fine, well-de- 
veloped bodies. They knew how to keep themselves 
clean. They had been under the tight discipline of 
the modern world from the moment they opened a 
first reader — in school, in factory, in business. And 
after they left school, it was a kind of voluntary 
discipline making, it seems to me, for higher aims 
in character than any kind of involuntary discipline. 
In the modern world as contrasted with the an- 
cient we all live under strict discipline, partly self- 
imposed. Every morning, the reader gets up and 
goes at a set hour to his office or shop. No bugle 
wakes him; no sergeant barks out the order to fall 
in and go to work. If he grows weary of getting 
up at six or seven, he has only to quit his job. He 
will not be shot or jailed or publicly disgraced for 
that, as he would if he deserted from the army. To 
quit the job might hurt his career, might work 
privation on his family — that is all. Every morning 
after breakfast I sit down and write. Today, there 
is a dog-show in town. I want very much to go. I 
am not going, because I have too much work to do. 
So I hold myself to writing — voluntarily. Now 
both the reader and I are doing a thing, it seems to 
me, better for our mortal fibre than as though the 
bugle blew us out of bed and the sergeant, backed 
by the whole force of the United States government, 
ordered us to work. It is self-discipline, self-con- 
trol, as contrasted with external discipline, external 
control. The modern world requires always more 



THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 121 

and more of this kind of discipline. That is one 
reason for the unexpected hardness and valor of all 
European and American troops in the late war — 
forty years of the discipline of peace. 

The Germans showed the way to the perfect 
"psychological preparation." Its main object, 
though not its sole one, is perfectly to overcome the 
natural fear of death. The Italian peasants of the 
ancient Roman army, it is said, fought so valiantly 
partly because the men feared their officers more 
than they did the enemy. We have found another 
and more scientific way — the power of habit. Take 
a man and accustom him to obedience, instant and 
unquestioned, in every act of his life. To obey be- 
comes in time a fixed habit, almost an obsession. 
The moment arrives when he must obey the whistle 
or the officer's command, and advance to probable 
death. Personal pride, fear of the disgraceful con- 
sequences in refusal, love of country, even sense of 
adventure, urge him forward of course; just as the 
natural shrinking from pain and death hold him 
back. But the governing factor in the perfect sol- 
dier is the ingrained habit of instant, unquestioning 
obedience. He goes because his very nervous re- 
flexes tell him that he must. 

I cannot find that in the old days of chivalrous 
warfare conscious hate played much part in the 
training of a soldier. The ideal — imperfectly felt 
and realized, but still an ideal — was the generous, 
adventurous warrior who hated his enemy perhaps, 



122 THE NEXT WAR 

but who spared him, too. "Brave as a lion, gentle 
as a woman." The Germans showed that there was 
a more useful method. "The best soldier is a bit of 
a brute," they said. In our military schools, we 
have always forbidden hazing. The German mili- 
tary schools encouraged it, in forms more gross than 
any of our youth imagined. That was done to culti- 
vate the required touch of brutality. In the close 
race for victory of the last war, we all had to follow. 
Uninstructed civilians, visiting the American, French 
and British training-camps, wondered at the time 
given to bayonet practice. They knew that the 
bayonet was rarely used in action. Why so much 
stress upon it? Any sergeant could explain that. It 
was a means of cultivating hate, of making your 
soldier a bit of a brute. That dummy at which you 
were thrusting — the instructor encouraged you to 
imagine him a German, to curse him, to work up a 
savage delight in mutilating him. It was a part of 
the higher psychology of modern war. 

There was propaganda, too — and here I must 
condense a theme for a whole book. This was one 
of the human forces existing before the great war, 
which the war reduced to its scientific terms; made 
tremendously usable. It was, really, our contribu- 
tion. The American science of advertising had 
shown by what means an idea may best be implanted 
in the greatest number of people. With all the press 
under control, the European Boards of Morale and 
Bureaus of Propaganda proceeded with conscious 



THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 123 

purpose to put into every people a mob-instinct of 
hatred for the enemy, man, woman and child. Since 
everyone who has a pair of working hands is useful 
to the purposes of a modern war, the hate-propa- 
ganda was aimed at the civilians as well as the sol- 
diers. But "keeping up morale" in the army was 
the main object. Generating hate in the civilian 
population made toward that end. If the soldier 
on leave heard from his women, his father and his 
uncles that the enemy were all a set of ruffians, a 
race which had nothing in common with the human 
race, it made him a better hater when he returned 
to the line. Half-truth was the best tool of this 
propaganda; but, war being the negation of all ordi- 
nary morality, the propagandists did not gag at lies. 
For a familiar example, there is the story about the 
Germans cutting off children's hands in Belgium. It 
was not true. I repeat that I was in Belgium during 
the first month of the war; that there were German 
atrocities, some of which I witnessed — atrocities 
committed by order, for the strategic purposes of 
the General Staff — but that no case of the kind I 
mention was ever fully proved. Nevertheless it was 
a popular war-rumor in the beginning; it had all the 
qualities which make a story "go." It was taken 
up by the propagandists, spread as a means of lash- 
ing up hate by men who knew better; so firmly fixed 
in the public mind that I myself have but lately been 
called "pro-German" for denying it. In fairness, 
I may add that they lied more grossly in Germany, 



124 THE NEXT WAR 

especially when the case grew desperate. There, 
cutting off women's breasts was the favorite night- 
mare tale. 

This hate-propaganda failed a little of its main 
purposes. The soldier swallowed it less avidly than 
the civilian population. If you wanted a tolerant 
view of the enemy, you were most likely to get it 
from a soldier sitting in a dugout under fire, his gas- 
mask at the alert. If you wanted to hear that the 
enemy was a creature not quite human, but a species 
of gorilla which should be exterminated to the last 
baby, you must go to some comfortable home in 
Paris or London — or equally I suppose in Berlin. 
Indeed, whole elements in the European armies 
quietly closed their minds to this form of propa- 
ganda. British officers of the old school, for exam- 
ple, tried to maintain the tradition of the warrior 
chivalrous even in his thoughts. It was a conven- 
tionality of most British headquarters messes not to 
speak ill of the enemy. If the civilian visitor intro- 
duced the "hate-stuff" into the conversation, he was 
answered by polite denials or by frigid silence. 

All this must be changed in the next war. You 
must focus your hatred where it is most useful and 
needed — in the soldiers at the front. And we are 
studying to change it. The propagandists and 
boards of morale are working and experimenting 
like the chemists — coolly reviewing the methods and 
mistakes of the last war, finding new methods with- 
out mistakes. 



THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 125 

Has the involuntary discipline of armies much to 
do with the voluntary discipline of peace? The 
aftermath of the late war goes to prove that the 
relation is a little remote. I know hundreds of 
young men — British, French, Belgian, Italian, Amer- 
ican — whom the war seemed to have spoiled at least 
temporarily for civilian pursuits. Accustomed to be 
disciplined by others, they seemed to have lost the 
habit of disciplining themselves. They found it 
difficult, almost impossible, to make themselves go 
to work at regular hours, stick to any one job or any 
practical object very long at a time. This psycho- 
logical aftermath of the war we all know, I think. 
You might lay it all to the actual war — its stresses 
and excitements, its alternate tense action and idle- 
ness — were it not that we find the same state of 
mind in young Americans who were mobilized in the 
draft, had their year and a half of army training, 
and never got abroad. It was hard to "settle 
down'*; which means that it was hard to change 
from imposed discipline to self-discipline, from the 
regularity of army life to the fast, irregular compe- 
tition of civilian life. 

The world over, we found that the hate-propa- 
ganda, the conscious effort to make the soldier "a 
bit of a brute" had long effects. Everywhere were 
"crime waves" — highway robbery, burglary, sudden 
murders of passion. Ours was perhaps the lightest 
of all. The police records of Berlin in 19 19 read 
like annals of the old days of Jack Sheppard. The 



126 THE NEXT WAR 

Belgian police were forced, for the first time since 
Barons ruled in Flanders, to fight organized gangs 
of bandits. England boasted in old years a low 
murder rate; and her courts had a swift and certain 
way of hanging for murder without regard to wealth 
or social rank. "The unwritten law" did not exist 
for British juries. Just after the war, England ex- 
perienced a series of "murders of passion," by ex- 
soldiers and ex-officers; and British juries acquitted 
the murderers as lightly as once did Latin judges. 
How much of this mentality back of these crime- 
waves sprang from actual experience at the Front 
and how much from the education in brutality of the 
new military training, no one of course can say. 
Doubtless both influences bore on this crime wave. 

Here in America and abroad, there are plans 
afoot for knitting army training a little more closely 
into civilian life. Experts on physical culture have 
testified that drill and setting-up exercises, as hith- 
erto practiced by armies, give an imperfect and one- 
sided physical development. It is proposed to revise 
army physical training on modern lines. It is pro- 
posed, further, to teach the men, while they are in 
the ranks, the elements at least of useful civilian 
trades. These are compromises, at best designed to 
reduce the ultimate cost of armies to society, at 
worst sops to public opinion. The chief end of 
military training is to teach men to fight. They 
must be drilled, first in order to inculcate the instinct 
of perfect obedience and second so that large bodies 



THE DISCIPLINE OF PEACE 127 

of troops may be moved without confusion. They 
must learn to use weapons, from the trench-grenade 
and the rifle to the aeroplane and the tank. Most 
of this training, from the point of view of ordinary, 
peace-time industry, is wasted. One of the chief 
economic losses in military training is the time and 
energy it takes from the most teachable years of best 
young men. It will be "war by machinery" in fu- 
ture; and those told off for the higher functions of 
war — such as tanks, aeroplanes and gas — will get, it 
is true, a certain training in mechanics and chemistry. 
But in just as much as these devices differ from the 
devices of peace, in just so much will the training 
be wasted, socially and economically. 



CHAPTER XI 

"defensive preparation" 

What should be our American attitude toward 
military preparation? The average hard-headed, 
practical American will perhaps say that if war has 
grown so deadly, it is all the more reason why we 
should prepare to defend ourselves. Without de- 
fence, we stand in peril of general extinction; with 
defence, we may avert war at least for a time, may 
soften the blow when it comes. Let us prepare 
then, says the American citizen, not for conquest, or 
"fulfilment of national aspirations" but for defence. 

Yes, provided only that we can, in this age of 
confusions and complexities, keep our military prep- 
arations defensive. And that is extremely difficult. 
Indeed, when you come to thorough defensive prep- 
aration, a hundred per cent efficient, it becomes 
perhaps impossible. The term "defence" needs de- 
fining; it has hitherto been used as a most effective 
hypocrisy of militarism. Keeping our coasts and 
borders against an invading enemy is pure defence; 
no one disputes that. But in the modern world a 
nation is not confined to its own political borders. 
The American mining engineer developing a lode 

128 



Money appropriated by the Unibed 
S tabes for Military Preparedness 
before and afber 
the World War. 




1909- 
1910 



1920- 
1921 



ESTIMATES 
1921 - 1922 



"DEFENSIVE PREPARATION" 131 

for the Ameer of Afghanistan is a part of America, 
just like the mining engineer driving a tunnel in 
Colorado. At this moment, that larger America is 
spreading. There is a new movement in world- 
industry. Instead of bringing the raw material to 
the power, men are beginning to bring the power to 
the raw material. India raises much first-rate cot- 
ton; she has also inexhaustible resources of labor. 
Hitherto, she has sold the raw cotton to England, 
where the coal is; now, India is going to spin and 
weave part of this cotton beside her own fields, 
partly with native water-power, partly with im- 
ported coal. We have the money of the world; and 
American capital has been flowing by hundreds of 
millions into such projects as this. If we are to have 
the perfect defence, we must prepare to back up 
American citizens and "American interests" in India 
as well as in Indiana, in New Guinea as well as in 
New York. It is hard, it is almost impossible, to 
draw the line; so we are pulled insensibly into the 
old, vicious circle. 

There comes a point in any thorough military 
preparation when the spirit of defence runs subtly 
into the spirit of offence. Again, Germany is the 
typical case. She was, her emperors, kings and gen- 
erals said, "ringed with foes." That, in the begin- 
ning, was not an entirely insincere presentation of 
the case. On one side lay France, smarting with 
the injustice of 1870; on another lay the barbaric 
Russia of the Czars, with double Germany's man- 



132 THE NEXT WAR 

power and an eye on Germany's developed wealth. 
On her seacoast lay the strong British Navy. 
"What is Germany?" asked question i in the public 
school catechism on geography, "It is your Father- 
land, entirely surrounded by enemies." Militarism 
was hammered into the German people in the form 
of defence, defence, always defence. And let me 
repeat; in the beginning the men who urged this 
were not all insincere. 

Germany went into the game of financial imperial- 
ism with the rest. The world was spotted with 
"spheres of influence," where German capital har- 
vested fields of trade or raw materials for the fac- 
tories of Berlin, Leipsic, Diisseldorf. These inter- 
ests must be protected; other capital must be kept 
out. The German army began to pass from a de- 
fensive force to an implied offensive force. In such 
crises as the transfer of Bosnia and Herzegovina, 
the Germans won because the Kaiser rattled his 
sword and the others yielded for fear he might turn 
loose his perfect army. 

There came, too, a mental change. "He who 
forges the sword will want to wield it." Here is one 
of the ways in which a national mind works like an 
individual mind. You have found, we will say, that 
you play an extraordinary game of lawn tennis. You 
will not long be satisfied with scrub games. You 
will want, if you are a normal man, to enter tour- 
naments, to prove your accomplishment and su- 
periority before the world. You discover that you 



"DEFENSIVE PREPARATION" 133 

write good poetry or fiction. How long will you 
be contented with sugared sonnets among your pri- 
vate friends? Sooner or later you will want to 
publish it and let the world see how clever you are. 
And so when you have the perfect army or navy, 
perfectly knit into the structure of the state, you 
will find some impulse which you may not at the 
time analyze, urging you toward its proof in action. 

Germany did. There was never such a glittering 
display of military power as in the old summer ma- 
noeuvres before the war. Doubtless any German 
who saw that great charge of massed cavalry by 
which they always ended, felt somewhere in him a 
glow as he thought of what Germany might do in 
real battle. The cloud gathered. With Germany — 
as even most Germans now admit — lay the decision 
for peace or war; and she chose war. It is absurd 
to blame the Kaiser alone; almost equally absurd to 
blame his counsellors alone. They were carried 
along, all of them, by a flood which had been rolling 
up in Germany for forty years. 

Yet even then, they maintained the fiction to their 
people — and half to themselves — that they were 
fighting a defensive war against the "ring of foes." 
The average German soldier whom I saw in Bel- 
gium during 19 14 believed this devoutly. Barbarous 
Russia and envious England had attacked the 
Fatherland. He fought in her defence. France 
must be crushed because she had foolishly joined 
these major enemies. Poor France! Now, if they 



134 THE NEXT WAR 

survive, these same Germans are calling France the 
source of all their woes, the true enemy. For the 
current is running in another direction, and the 
strategy of propaganda has changed. But this is a 
digression. Germany illustrates, among other 
things, the danger in the perfect defensive prepara- 
tion and the difficulty of drawing the line between 
defence and offence. 

Some may note that I have not touched upon the 
question of national honor. The individual in so- 
ciety sometimes meets a situation outside the law so 
intolerable that he is less than a man if he does not 
take the law into his own hands; and so it is with 
nations. The circumstance which drew us into the 
Great War was an unusually clean-cut example of an 
unpardonable affront. Germany had announced 
cold-bloodedly, flatly, that American vessels could 
no longer sail the most frequented seas of the world; 
if they did, the hulls would be destroyed, the crews 
killed without warning. The occasions of war are 
not commonly so simple as this. "National honor" 
is more often the excuse for economic and political 
interests, or the mere focus of trouble arising from 
a conflict of such interests. The occasion of the 
Great War, the spark which set the mine, was the 
assassination of an Austrian prince in Serbia. Be- 
hind that lay thirty or forty years of intrigue lead- 
ing up to a "situation." Austria wanted to make 
Serbia a vassal economically, and in the end politi- 



"DEFENSIVE PREPARATION" 135 

cally. Germany wanted to extend a "line of 
influence" through the Balkans in order to build an 
all-German Berlin-to-Bagdad railway. The Entente 
nations wanted to prevent all this. Had no such 
situation Iain behind the assassination at Sarajevo, 
the matter would have been settled with an apology, 
punishment of the criminals and perhaps indemnity. 

Let us imagine another case. Mr. Colby, then 
our Secretary of State, visited South America in 
1920. Suppose that in Rio de Janeiro some fanatic 
or band of fanatics had murdered him. Would that 
have led to war between the United States and 
Brazil? Almost certainly no. But suppose that 
Brazil and the United States had long been engaged 
in an economic and political struggle to control by 
their capital the resources of Ecuador, Colombia and 
Central America. Suppose them both prepared to 
the last belt-buckle. Would it then have led to war? 
Almost certainly yes. And most Americans would 
say — as did the Austrians in 19 14 — that we were 
drawing the sword to avenge national honor and 
wipe out an intolerable insult. 

Building up armies, navies, and munitions indus- 
tries solely through the fear of national insult, solely 
to protect honor, seems a little like carrying a loaded 
pistol night and day lest perhaps someone insult you 
intolerablv, beyond recourse of law. 

Yet the fact remains: few Americans of spirit will 
want, in this era of the world, to strip us of all our 
defences. That goes beyond the reasonable pacifism 



136 THE NEXT WAR 

which has hitherto been the general American atti- 
tude toward war. It becomes the non-resistance of 
the dreamer, Tolstoi. Apart from its danger, 
completely laying down our own arms would be no 
good, except by example. We must reach further 
back than that into the structure of things; try, with 
all the others, to repair this world-machine. At 
present, it is like some great, complex engine which 
has broken a vital part. It tends to beat itself to 
pieces with its own power. 



CHAPTER XII 

THE DRAMATIC MOMENT 

Now is the appointed time to begin action, and 
we are the appointed people. The lesson of the last 
war is still fresh in mind; and unto us, by luck rather 
than our own foresight, has been given the dominat- 
ing position in the world of the next quarter-century. 
The course which the United States chooses will 
largely be the course of the other nations. 

It is the appointed time for still another reason, 
less obvious, no less compelling. All old, imperfect 
human institutions have their uses in their period; 
then that usefulness passes and we must rid our- 
selves of them. Monarchy in its absolute form 
served the development of humanity. The half- 
civilized man could not grasp conceptions so ab- 
stract as his relation and his duty toward other men 
in his group or clan or nation. He needed a visible, 
personal representation of power. So was built up 
loyalty; from loyalty grew the fine sentiment of 
patriotism; from patriotism the sense of team-work 
in society. Then monarchy was outworn. We 
sloughed it off, at first in its absolute form, then 
faster and faster in any form at all. Slavery may 

137 



138 THE NEXT WAR 

have been necessary to build up the habit of steady 
work among tribes and nations. Races learned the 
habit of steady work, and sloughed off slavery. 

War on the whole was long useful to humanity — 
expensive, but the best way we had. I have pre- 
viously quoted Wells to show how it drew races 
into the circle of progress. Long before there was 
history even in popular ballad, some genius in some 
tribe of the Asiatic steppes invented the wheel. His 
tribe went to war and won or lost — that does not 
matter. Before the war was over, the enemy had 
seen the wheel, learned its usefulness, was making 
wheels of his own. But for war, outlying tribes on 
the fringe of humanity might have skidded their 
heavy burdens along the ground for centuries and 
aeons. At the end of the Stone Age, some savage 
discovered that tin and copper, thrown into the fire, 
melted, blended, produced a substance which could 
be hammered to a fine, sharp edge — a tool much 
better than any chipped stone. He used his bronze 
knife in war; the enemy felt its edge, admired, pene- 
trated the secret, passed it on by war to tribes still 
further outlying. So we progressed from the Stone 
Age to the age of metals. 

War, too, worked with monarchism to develop 
what scholars call the group-consciousness. It 
stirred up in men a fine, high, human emotion for 
the humanity outside themselves. The average man 
in all times and all nations up to the eighteenth and 



THE DRAMATIC MOMENT 139 

nineteenth centuries led an extremely limited life. 
Of his own motion, he seldom stirred from his own 
domain or farm or village. War alone drew him 
out to teach him that there was a world beyond his 
horizon, that there were other men with other i-deas 
not only among his own people but among stranger 
clans. War made a tremendous contribution to hu- 
man experience, to collective human consciousness. 
That was its use, its larger reason for being. 

Now, modern invention has changed all that. 
We no longer need a process so essentially wasteful 
to transmit the results of progress. When Wright 
proved to Europe that a man can fly through the 
air, the news was flashed that very night to every 
corner of the globe; three-quarters of the civilized 
world read it next morning. Within a month, such 
remote points as Shanghai, Cape Town and Buenos 
Aires had European publications with technical re- 
ports; any good mechanic who wished could go 
about building an aeroplane. The remote parts of 
the globe were by now coming fast into the circle of 
communication. Before the Great War, all the in- 
accessible places had been explored — even Thibet 
and the two poles. The world had no more secrets 
and mysteries. From end to end of Africa, the 
infant continent, ran a railroad; Africa was spotted 
with European settlements, in touch with civilization 
by telegraph-lines. The printing-press, the railroad, 
the automobile, the electric telegraph have all given 



140 THE NEXT WAR 

their part toward the intensity of modern war; yet 
at the same time they have removed one of its su- 
preme necessities for being. As for its other use — 
instilling into men the sense of a duty toward his 
country or his group — that work also is done. In 
fact, when one considers the conceited, excessive, 
Jingo patriotism of most races and nations, it be- 
comes a question whether it is not too well done. 

We cannot say at what precise moment in history 
monarchism and slavery proved themselves out- 
worn, past their usefulness; became not benevolent 
organs but dangerous rudiments — like a vermiform 
appendix — in the body politic. But war, always 
picturesque, died its spiritual death dramatically. 
We may say with certainty I think that it proved 
itself outworn during that little moment of history 
between 1914-18. It was of no more use in spread- 
ing progress, of little more use in building up the 
sense of collective djuty. And in itself it suddenly 
became dangerous, sordid, disturbing beyond the 
imagination of devils. 

Two great tasks lie before humanity in the rest 
of the twentieth century. One is to put under 
control of true morals and of democracy the great 
power of human production which came in the 
nineteenth century. The other is to check, to 
limit and finally to eliminate the institution of war. 
This last is the more important. We may stagger 
on, and make progress even, though the industrial 
and financial structure remains as it is — we were 



THE DRAMATIC MOMENT 141 

doing very well, on the whole, before 19 14. But 
if war goes on unchecked, following its present 
tendencies, it means the elimination of whole races 
— always the best races — and the downfall of civ- 
ilization. 



CHAPTER XIII 

PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 

Perhaps we cannot eliminate war. It seems so 
deeply rooted in human institutions! It is so easy 
to stir up hate, so hard to create understandings 1 
Thus, in the late eighteenth century, the republican 
must have felt about the elimination of kings. The 
institution of monarchy appeared unassailable — the 
task seemed at times hopeless. And surely we 
cannot, unless we work up the zeal of those early 
republicans, make reasonable pacifism a governing 
motive in our political thinking and action. 

Yet this reasonable pacifism had made progress, 
even before the late war. Peace, all the reference 
books will tell you, had in the nineteenth century 
cast off its old negative meaning and taken on a 
positive meaning. It was no longer regarded simply 
as the rest between wars; it was an end in itself. 
The Hague Conferences, powerless as they were to 
prevent either the great war or its barbarities, still 
showed that a great part of humanity wanted peace, 
would take much trouble to get it. We, by our 
relations with Latin America, proved how two conti- 
nents might live in practical harmony. When Secre- 

142 



PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 143 

tary of State Blaine called the first conference with 
Latin America, he set up a milestone on the road to 
permanent peace. 

So strong indeed had become this desire and hope 
among most Western European nations that the 
very militarists among the Allies were forced dur- 
ing the late war to use the phrase "the war against 
war" in order to keep up the fighting spirit among 
their people. And when the war was over, the at- 
tempt to form a League of Nations afforded still 
another proof. I shall not enter into the late con- 
troversy. But the League was the work, of politi- 
cians, all responsible to democracies for their jobs. 
They would never have made the attempt had they 
not believed that it would be popular. 

The Peace of Versailles, imperfect though it may 
have been, proved in other ways how far we had 
moved beyond old conceptions of national glory. 
After former wars, the conquerors usually took over 
without shame the territory of the conquered, no 
matter how the inhabitants felt. Even as late as 
1 87 1, the neutrals did not protest officially and but 
very little unofficially when Germany seized the un- 
willing Alsace-Lorraine. But in the Peace of Ver- 
sailles, European statesmen had to give at least 
lip-service to the principle that no nation or no part 
of a nation may permanently be held by a conqueror 
against the will of the inhabitants. Again: they did 
this because they were politicians, and had satisfied 
themselves that a new moral consciousness in man- 



144 THE NEXT WAR 

kind demanded a new conception of national rights 
and methods. 

Back from the war came the plain men of the 
democracies old and new — thirty or forty millions 
of them. The greater part of them, and especially 
the thinking part, had been quarreling in their 
thoughts with the institution of war. If our re- 
turned soldiers felt this less than their European 
comrades, it was because they had borne a shorter 
strain and had needed less of the propaganda of 
peace through war to keep up their morale. The 
Societe des Anciens Combatants in France corre- 
sponds to our American Legion. Lodge after lodge 
of that society in 1919 passed a resolution saying 
that their real object now is "la guerre a la guerre" 
(war against war). The rumor, spread by gov- 
ernments as a feeler, that the British and French 
armies were going to Russia to fight the Bolsheviki 
produced instant riots and mutinies. I witnessed 
the Ruhr Rebellion of April, 1920, in Germany. 
Now while this revolt was stirred up by the Com- 
munists, the average Ruhr insurgent, I found, was 
out primarily to end militarism. "If those soldiers 
have their own way," said the men of the Ruhr, 
"we'll be fighting the French again in two years. 
We don't want any more wars." 

Yet so strange are these times that governments, 
supposed to be the expression of peoples, emerged 
from the Peace of Versailles more nationalistic, 
perhaps more belligerent, than ever before. Na- 



PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 145 

tionalism, the denial of peace, is running riot. Those 
returned soldiers, with all their pacifist sentiment, 
find themselves like the rest of humanity caught in 
a wheel. Jean the Frenchman does not want any 
more war. But the North lies devastated ; until the 
fields of the Somme are bearing again, the chimneys 
of Picardy smoking, his shop will never do good 
business. Hans the miner of the Ruhr district got 
out his army Mauser last year and tried to shoot 
a reactionary officer in order to show that he wanted 
no more war. But Hans believes that the indemnity 
which France wants is excessive; he knows that if 
Germany pays it, he himself will have lower wages 
and higher taxes all his life. So Jean and Hans put 
their interests into the hands of the strong men of 
Europe — men with the old ideas, men whose con- 
ception of statesmanship is force unlimited. "His 
only scheme of politics," said an American diplomat 
of an eminent European confrere, "is 'send a di- 
vision.' " 

The pacifism of the returned European soldier, of 
the disgusted but submerged European civilian, is a 
somewhat abnormal state of mind. It resembles a 
little the psychology of a religious revival. Not 
even the most enthusiastic revivalist expects that 
his people will maintain permanently all those 
heights of fervor and virtue to which he has raised 
them. The wise church is the one which consoli- 
dates its gains; makes the revival or mission yield 
permanent fruit in sober, day-by-day piety, unselfish- 



146 THE NEXT WAR 

ness and good living. If we let this moment pass, 
the nations will forget. The memories of the hor- 
rors, the destructions, the follies of Armageddon will 
die out as its debts are paid off, as the new gener- 
ation grows up; and, as in old wars, only the sou- 
venirs of its glories will remain. 

Now, I repeat, is the appointed time to consoli- 
date what Armageddon won for peace, and we, both 
actually and potentially the strongest nation of the 
world, are the appointed people. 

Along what practical lines may we proceed? 

Doubtless accumulated experience, translated into 
policies and action by men of genius, and leadership 
will find us new ways. But here are the courses of 
possible action on which many are thinking at pres- 
ent and a few working: 

First and most drastically, we may create a real 
law, not a mere set of gentlemen's agreements be- 
tween nation and nation. That is the kernel of the 
matter. 

Law is the set of agreements, backed up by some 
kind of force, to prevent murder and theft and in- 
justice between the individuals of a tribe or a state. 
In the savage beginning of things, men probably 
killed whomsoever they wished, took whatsoever 
they desired. But people could not get along and 
make progress on that plan. An individual with the 
fighting endowments of a Jack Dempsey had it all 
his own way. Before long, men got together and 
drew up primary rules of the human game. You 



PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 147 

kept, we will say, the stone knife which you had 
chipped for yourself. No one might take it from 
you except he give an equivalent; no one might kill 
you except with certain definite excuses. It was fur- 
ther agreed that whoever broke this rule should be 
punished by the collective action of all the rest. No 
one man could thrash the Jack Dempsey of the tribe ; 
but two or three men could, much more the whole 
tribe. That was the beginning of law and order — 
an understanding as to the rules of the game, an 
agreement to punish whoever broke those rules. 
Wise old David Lubin used to say that he believed 
this was also the beginning of morals. And indeed, 
even if there was in primitive man some inbred sense 
of kindness and of property right, that feeling never 
expressed itself in action until men drew up rules 
and agreed to back them by force. 

Nearly everyone who thinks must have wondered 
at times why it is supremely wrong to kill a fellow 
citizen in time of peace, supremely right to kill a 
foreigner in time of war; why lying and deceit, 
despicable when used against your fellow-country- 
man, become noble when used against your national 
enemy. I have explained the reason. As soon as 
we organized states and tribes, we began to endow 
them with a personality, to give them a being. And 
between these beings the law did not run. They 
had never got together, to draw up rules of the 
game and provide penalties against the violators of 
this code of morals. Consequently, there were real- 



148 THE NEXT WAR 

ly no morals between states. If in times of peace 
nations refrained from murdering the citizens of 
other nations, from seizing their property, that was 
because they feared the disagreeable consequences 
involved in these acts. It was, again, like the state 
of primitive society before men made laws and or- 
ganized a police force. When one primitive man 
respected his neighbor's property, it was because he 
did not care to get into a fight. The process was 
too disagreeable; it was not worth while. But 
when his desire grew greater than his fears or when 
his blood was heated, he took or killed with at best 
only a vague sense of moral wrong. 

But finally, when the law within nations became 
so perfectly established that murder, theft and arson 
grew uncommon, sporadic, it was as though the 
reservoir of morals filled up and began to flow over 
the dams dividing nations. Diplomats and others 
who represented sovereign states went on lying, de- 
ceiving, committing daily in peace or war acts which, 
performed by one citizen of a state against another, 
would have been punished by ostracism, jail or the 
gallows. And they justified themselves to them- 
selves and their fellow-citizens because it was done 
for the flag, the Patrie, the Fatherland. The cause 
sweetened any method. But public opinion concern- 
ing some of these methods grew so strong as to force 
these gentlemen at least to hypocrisy. Since the 
state knows no morals in its relation with other 
states, a treaty used to be a sort of temporary agree- 



PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 149 

ment for temporary advantage. You kept it be- 
cause it did not suit your convenience to break, it. 
If a treaty became no longer convenient to one 
party or the other — well, kings used to tear up 
treaties and feel very little necessity for apology or 
explanation. When Germany violated one of her 
most solemn treaties and invaded Belgium, she 
broke, really, no moral law. Do not believe that 
the cynical diplomats of the Entente Allies blamed 
her in their hearts. But peoples did blame her. 
The moral sense of individuals the world over rose 
against such an act; a man who behaved in this way 
counted himself out of society; why not a nation, 
too? The one fact which German propaganda could 
never explain away was the invasion of Belgium; it 
is perhaps the spiritual reason why Germany lost 
the war. 

So we have already the moral basis for law be- 
tween nations; at present, however, it is a force, not 
a power, because it has no machinery to make it 
useful. It is like the potential electricity going to 
waste in a mountain river. This force will not be- 
come power, will not turn wheels, run railroads and 
light cities, until you harness it — create for it some 
machinery. 

We shall not strike at the root of wars until we 
organize fifty or sixty sovereign nations and self- 
governing colonies of the world somewhat as we or- 
ganize individuals in a tribe or state or nation. In 
plain, human terms, they must get together, pass 



150 THE NEXT WAR 

laws to define and forbid national murder and na- 
tional burglary, and agree to punish, with their col- 
lective force, any violator of that law. 

The punishment need not wholly, need not mainly, 
consist in physical force. The discussions preced- 
ing the League of Nations showed, theoretically at 
least, that a general economic boycott might be as 
effective as military action. This follows a rule of 
progress in human society. Once, law knew only 
one kind of penalty for crime — physical action. 
The criminal was killed or mutilated or flogged. In 
the eighteenth century, the English would hang a 
man for stealing six shillings. We have done away 
with flogging and mutilation, have abolished hang- 
ing except for the gravest crimes. We have substi- 
tuted imprisonment and fine. Think it out and you 
will see that imprisonment is mostly an economic 
penalty, as a fine is wholly an economic penalty. 

This book, I repeat, is not a plea for or against 
the existing League of Nations. Call your organi- 
zation a League of Nations, an association of na- 
tions, a Hague Tribunal "with teeth in it" — call it 
what you will, organize it how you will. This is the 
specific for the disease of war. But while we wait 
for this inevitable organization to form and to be- 
come effective, we may use a few pain-killers and 
poultices. 

Among these, the most important is disarmament 
— a pressing, vital question of the moment. Behind 
the present agitation lies a compelling economic 



PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 151 

motive. Europe cannot recover if she goes on with 
the old race for armaments. She will collapse under 
the double burden. The world is so interlocked 
that if Europe blows up in anarchy we, though we 
hold together, must suffer terribly. An agreement 
to limit armies and navies to the point where they 
cannot be used aggressively can probably be en- 
forced. We have no formal law between nations, 
it is true; but that uncharted moral opinion of 
democracies is perhaps powerful enough to secure 
a rough working agreement until we get something 
better. It cannot be done without the consent — 
indeed without the leadership — of the United States. 
We have as much economic and industrial power to 
manufacture navies and munitions as any three 
European nations, more population to furnish sol- 
diers than any two Western European nations. If 
we arm to the teeth, the rest must follow through 
fear. 

Such partial disarmament will serve not only as 
temporary alleviation; it will be also in the nature 
of a remedy. Whatever movement sets the nations 
thinking positively about peace, whatever forces 
them into co-operation instead of competition, 
makes toward their final, complete understanding. 
Finally, it will prevent the psychological drift to- 
ward war which comes with perfected armaments. 

If I have anywhere made it appear that the term 
"militarist" is equivalent to the term "professional 
soldier," I have done the military clan a wrong. 



152 THE NEXT WAR 

Only lately our two most eminent soldiers, Bliss and 
Pershing, have come out flatly for a disarmament 
program. They admit that it will not be easy; and 
no more will it. You cannot complete the job 
with a Congressional resolution and a flourish of 
the pen. Too many eminent gentlemen in all na- 
tions have something to gain by the race of arma- 
ments. But it is a first necessary step. 

Then, even before we have a league, association 
or effective High Court of Nations, we may get at 
some of the economic causes for war. 

The "financial imperialism" which brought on the 
Great War had three wholly commercial objects — 
trade, raw materials, export of capital. The strug- 
gle for trade — for profitable foreign markets — is, 
in the opinion of many economists, the least danger- 
ous of the three. For while it is a cause of friction, 
it has also a pacific tendency. When two nations 
begin to trade with each other, there follow personal 
acquaintance and a community of interest. We 
saw that at the beginning of the Great War, when 
many Americans in the exporting business sincerely 
took sides either with Germany or England because 
they had with Germans or Englishman business rela- 
tions and personal acquaintance. The most danger- 
ous factor in national trade is tariffs. I am not 
preaching for or against tariffs. But they can be 
so drawn as to take unfair advantage, to work in- 
justice against some given nation. The tariff is no 
longer purely a domestic question. We must draw 



PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 153 

our schedules no longer with an eye solely on imme- 
diate national prosperity; we must consider them 
also in the light of good and just international re- 
lations. 

Some kind of international agreement concerning 
the distribution of raw materials seems necessary to 
permanent peace. If any great nation should in 
this year corner the international supply of flax, for 
example, the great linen industry of Belgium would 
be ruined; for Belgium raises only a little domestic 
flax. Italy has most expert and intelligent work- 
men, together with certain other manufacturing ad- 
vantages; she has no coal nor iron ore. Shut off 
coal and iron from Italy and the Valley of the Po 
knows acute distress. No longer should any nation 
or combinations of nations be allowed to monopo- 
lize any imported raw material. 

Finally: the advantageous export of capital was 
perhaps the main object of financial imperialism and 
so one of the main causes for the late war. In the 
intense struggle at home, your capital would yield 
you only three or four or five per cent. Put into a 
new, undeveloped country, it might yield you — any- 
thing. Only it would not return its big interest- 
rate for long if other capitalists in other nations 
themselves saw the chance, came in, and competed. 
The game of the international flotation houses 
which represented national surplus capital was to 
keep their "sphere of influence" exclusive. This 
was the chief commercial object of the huge arma- 



154 THE NEXT WAR 

merits, the rattling of swords when diplomacy ran 
into a deadlock. Before the Great War that proc- 
ess was running a dangerous course in China. 
Here, you were in a British "sphere of influence"; 
in general non-British capital was not wanted, could 
not get a foothold. Here, the influence was Ger- 
man; here, French. And the nations were jockey- 
ing to extend their sphere further and further into 
China — without regard of course for the feelings of 
the inhabitants. 

Some internationalization of export capital seems 
necessary to permanent peace. This may come 
through an association of nations; it may come be- 
fore that association is effective through action of 
the great flotation houses. Most banking men 
want peace; war is too disturbing, armaments are 
too costly. But in strategic control of the world's 
financial interests before the war were too many 
ruthless adventurers allied with the military and 
financial adventurers. Banking also was caught 
in a wheel. There are the signs that sober sense 
is coming into this business. The "Chinese con- 
sortium" is an association of the capital of many 
nations for investment in China. It may be open 
to criticism on some grounds; but let us give credit 
where credit is earned. Such an arrangement tends 
to do away with "spheres of influence," with the 
seeming necessity for keeping up armament and a 
state of passive warfare in order to protect export 



PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 155 

capital. It squares with the international finance 
of the future. 

Last but not least, we Americans have it in our 
power to abolish that secret diplomacy which, every- 
one agrees, makes toward wars. We cannot have 
much secret diplomacy ourselves, since all our inter- 
national agreements must be thrashed out and rati- 
fied in the Senate, and so published. The trend of 
the period, fortunately, is against the gum-shoe 
method of arriving at national understandings which 
become in due time misunderstandings. Really, 
monarchs before the great war had not nearly so 
much irresponsible power as diplomats; and the 
right to conceal their agreements from their people 
was their best tool. That is changing. Great 
Britain, once as much a sinner as the rest, has but 
lately registered and published with the League of 
Nations the twenty-one treaties and agreements 
which she has made since the war, has given her 
national word of honor that she is holding nothing 
back. Even before we enter some kind of associa- 
tion of nations, we have probably the power to end 
much of the secret diplomacy. We need merely 
announce that we will not recognize any treaty which 
has not been published to the world. 

Yet — returning to the kernel of the matter — we, 
the citizens of the world, shall not find that the or- 
ganization of law between nations is enough in itself 



156 THE NEXT WAR 

to keep peace; just as within the nations of the 
world law alone is not enough to prevent crime and 
establish order. You may happen to see this morn- 
ing a beautiful automobile which you would like to 
own, standing unlocked and unguarded. Why don't 
you jump in and drive away? First, because you 
fear disagreeable consequences from the law. The 
police will chase you, probably catch you, eventually 
put you in jail. But is that the only reason? No; 
you are restrained by an instinct first implanted in 
your little, savage bosom at your mother's knee, and 
intensified by your whole education — the feeling 
that it is wrong to steal. In order to keep society 
together, we need both these forces. 

So it goes with this question of order and morality 
among nations. We need the law; we need also 
personal ethics — international morality. By the 
forces of light which we have — churches, schools, 
all associations of men for spiritual and intellectual 
ends — we need to strengthen the belief that a state, 
including your own, can do wrong, that between 
nations there is such a thing as live and let live, that 
humanity is greater than mere race. 

This does not mean abolishing the sentiment of 
patriotism. There are two conceptions of that 
noble old emotion. One ends at the mental condi- 
tion of Germany in 1914 — the state for the state's 
sake, your hand ever on your sword to protect her 
honor and her interests, though every person in the 
state be rendered less happy by the process. The 



PROPOSED WAYS TO PEACE 157 

other regards the nation as an agency for the great- 
est good of the greatest number. He who follows 
this conception takes his pride not in his nation's 
hollow victories of arms but in her achievements of 
order, common prosperity, art, science, industry. 
The one is the old-fashioned patriotism, grown in 
the twentieth century to a world-menace; the other 
is the patriotism of the future. 

Again let me make a human comparison. In all 
times poets have sung of the nation as the Mother, 
of its citizens as her sons and daughters. Now you 
may interpret your love for your mother in two 
ways, one sane, the other a little insane. You may 
work peacefully to keep her happy and well-housed 
and well-fed. This, I suppose, states the attitude 
of most of us toward our mothers. But of course 
you may go round with a pistol in your pocket, al- 
ways ready to start a fight with anyone who may 
say that she is not the best of mothers, or watching 
for an opportunity to hold up a shop and steal the 
fur coat which she happens to want. So, I suppose, 
the savage expressed his love for his mother in the 
days before the law; in recent ages we have had 
less and less patience with this form of filial de- 
votion. 



CHAPTER XIV 

THE TEMPTER 

Now, my America, I will take you to an exceed- 
ing high mountain; I will show you all the kingdoms 
of the world and the glory of them. 

What an opportunity we have in this year 1921 ! 
Here we sit in the midst of our Continent, great and 
rich as all Western Europe. Almost are we un- 
scathed by the war, while the others which were 
Powers but six years ago struggle now with an- 
archy and bankruptcy. The power of Powers has 
been given into our hands. 

The British navy once held mastership of the 
seas. We can now take mastership ourselves. 
Ships are made of steel; the great steel-producing 
nation may if it wishes be the great naval nation. And 
steel is made of coal and iron. While the British 
coal measures ever shrink, we have only begun to 
tap ours; while the British struggle for imported 
iron ore, we mine more than we need. And so 
clever are we at mass-production that we make more 
steel to the man and to the furnace than any other 
people of the world. Great Britain kept her navy 
stronger than that of any two other powers; we, 

158 



THE TEMPTER 159 

with less effort, may keep ours stronger than that 
of all the other powers. 

Think, too, of our military potentiality! We 
may, if we will, summon to the colors more soldiers 
than France, Germany and Belgium put together. 
And what soldiers! Beside our stalwart divisions, 
their comrades on the European battlefields looked 
scrawny. We have learned war, now; the Ameri- 
can army has been brought up to date. We have 
at this instant more munitions, lying greased and 
ready in storage, than any other nation on earth. 
We have more manufacturing power for new mu- 
nitions than any other two nations. Back of 
it all, we have the American ingenuity which gave 
the world so many of its industrial inventions in the 
nineteenth century. We, of all, will know best 
how to keep ahead of the new warfare. Did we 
not invent Lewisite gas? Did we not show how 
aeroplane engines, hitherto manufactured painfully 
by hand, could be poured out by machine processes, 
like Ford cars? 

South from our borders to the isthmus runs a suc- 
cession of undeveloped countries, as rich and nearly 
as large as our own national domain. They need 
capital; we are exporting capital faster and faster. 
Here lies much profit for us all — if we can keep the 
field exclusive. Our diplomacy, if backed by the 
unprecedented military power we have at command, 
can keep it exclusive. Then, some day when we 
hold a tight financial grip on Mexico, Guatemala 



160 THE NEXT WAR 

and the rest, there may follow — incidents. We may 
find it necessary to go down and take these countries 
over — as a means of defending Americans and 
American capital abroad. Why not? Is not our 
civilization better than that of Mexico and Guate- 
mala? Will not the inhabitants be higher and bet- 
ter if we take over their responsibilities and make 
them Americans? 

Canada lies to our North; very rich in resources, 
less developed than we are; inhabited by people 
with the same language as ours, of very much the 
same habits of thought. When we have the domi- 
nant navy, perhaps the British Empire may break 
up; perhaps Canada may wish to throw in her lot 
with us, either as a member of our Confederation 
or as a close ally. West of us lies the Pacific; with 
our dominant fleet, we may make it an American 
lake. 

What national greatness, what glory! "Domin- 
ion over palm and pine" — why, we shall hold do- 
minion over Arctic tundra and tropical jungle. No 
empire, whether it be Rome of the second century 
or Spain of the sixteenth or Great Britain of the 
nineteenth, ever held complete, undisputed mastery 
of its own continent. But we shall. The old Spain 
of the Philips called the Mediterranean "Mare 
Nostrum" — our sea — the little Mediterranean 1 
Our sea will be the Pacific, mightiest of all oceans. 
With what a thrill may the schoolboy of 1950 sa- 



THE TEMPTER 161 

lute our flag, symbol of such power and glory as 
never was since history began ! 

So was Germany led to an exceeding high moun- 
tain. Germany listened to the tempter and chose 
the kingdoms of the world. And Germany in 
1921 . . . 

Ah, but the tempter never lets you read to the 
end of the chapter; never shows you the whole 
picture. Behind these gorgeous visions floating in 
rosy mist lurk death . . . poverty . . . starva- 
tion . . . despair ... a civilization become offal 
and ashes. He does not show you these; he knows 
that he is at war with the purposes of eternity. 



THE END 



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